Not Your Usual News

by Bicky Tolar

I have been involved in ministry to single moms for 3 and a half years.

Week after week, women in painful circumstances come and pour their hearts out to each other, asking all kinds of questions, sharing unbelievable stories.

When we ask for something and don’t receive it, it’s easy to wonder why not. God’s power is incomprehensible. He can actually walk up to a dead person and tell them to come out of their grave. How much more does He have the power to fix what’s hurting us? Every single thing!

We take great comfort in God’s power. But we get confused and hurt, just like Mary and Martha when Lazarus died, when God doesn’t use His power to help us in our times of pain.

This happened to Jesus, too. In Gethsemane, Jesus asked God for something he knew he wouldn’t receive. He asked God to change his circumstances and keep Him from having to die. But God didn’t.

We focus so much on this life. No, our view is even smaller than that. We focus so much on our own little corner.

Look at this world map. There are thousands – even millions – of prayers going up every single day. God has the power to say yes to all of them. He could fix every single hurt in this world. Cancer, divorce, poverty, wars, drugs, child abuse, you name it. God could wipe it out. Forever.

Why doesn’t he?

Due to some writing Lance, my husband, and I have been doing, we have been trying to think about “the Problem of Pain” (as CS Lewis calls it) from His perspective. Lance told me something so profound, and though I heard it, it didn’t hit me in the heart until this afternoon. God chooses not to fix this world. Jesus often withdrew from the needy crowds pressing on him for healing. Jesus didn’t save John the Baptist from getting beheaded by Herod. God didn’t save Jesus from the Cross. Unanswered prayers.

The next life begins now, if we let God use our suffering.Faith is not preventative – it’s only an insurance policy that gives us security. When disaster occurs (and it will), we have a foundation from which to operate.Relieving the problem of pain was not why he came. He just wanted to give a few “signs….” To show who he was, to point to the future, at the end of time. Only then will everything be put right.

“We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who he has given us.”

I regularly watch the talking heads in our multimedia world dispense their wisdom upon the faceless masses. I, with equal regularity, wonder what world many of them are living in. None of them seem to live in my world. I am not as educated, wealthy, or “successful.” And yet when I watch yet another talking head tell me what I need to do to improve my life I am reminded of a conceit that our society carries: we have what it takes to figure it out. We just need the education, the right program, the habits, the training…

What concerns me are the massive assumptions the experts of our world make: you can change your life with the right advice and the proper level of determination. I laugh at this. Why? It’s simple: How do you figure out what the right advice is? And, how do you summon up the determination to really CHANGE? (Volumes and volumes have been written about that one…)

With our intellectual and scientific craving there are massive markets that have emerged for the self-help industry. Just the fact that you understand the term “self-help industry” makes this self evident. With the amount of personal failure I have experienced, combined with witnessing the protracted life-wreckage of many people I know and love, I have become easily convinced that human advice is sketchy and unreliable at best. I am looking for something BEYOND human wisdom. Something that is true, regardless of what I think about it.

The crash-and-burn lives of so many of my friends and family are stunning in their pain and disillusionment. As I stand in the debris field of so many walking dead, I am convinced that the better way to live will not be arrived at by our education or wealth, science or intelligence. It has got to come from somewhere else. Where is your life-wisdom coming from?

Life, that is… I spend most of my life catching up with the meaning of events that have already passed me by. I was at my own birth, but it took me years to figure out what had happened. I was in school for a long time before I even realized why I was supposed to be there. I have been married an extraordinarily long time (by contemporary standards, unfortunately) and I am still figuring out what a wonderful thing I actually got myself into.

Nobody has it all figured out, and we are constantly updating our sense of what is important, what is vital to us. We look back, we look forward, we look around us and think, “Huh?” a lot of the time. Ever meet one of those people who like plan out their entire year in advance, have a specific career path, with a singular investment strategy and a seemingly invulnerable plan for any eventuality? There aren’t very many of them, but man do I find them irritating. I am still catching up with the implications of things that hit me 20+ years ago.

Just think: We are told our birthday. We were there, but have not got a clue about it. We are told what our grades were on a test; do we do the research on what the right answers actually are, or do we just trust the teacher? We are told that we were speeding by the police officer writing us a ticket; was his radar gun accurate, or is our speedometer actually correct? It is incredible how clueless we are about many things we treat as FACTS, and yet they may be entirely debatable.

I am looking for the real deal for the most important things in my life: the meaning of my everyday activities, the legacy I will leave that will remain after I am forgotten, the reality of my existence. We take the vast majority of the information about our lives on trust. We trust someone to tell us the truth, whether it is our ideal body weight, or our character flaws, or our income tax refund, or the truth of what we believe about the world.

Yes, the truth IS out there, but who are you listening to to find it?

Everyone has a story. Most of us slip and slide through most of our days wondering if we actually have a clue what we are doing with our lives and where it will lead. Some people have things mapped out: their career, their family plans, their retirement. They have confidence in their ability to choose their path in life. If you are one of those people stop reading this now. You will think that people who read and post here are possibly mentally challenged. I think that, and I am the one writing this. This place in the virtual world is for people who question their lives, question their ability to make right choices, and consider their lives and unfolding story that can’t be predicted. My story is more like that, though it doesn’t really matter who I am.

I don’t know about you, but as for me I can only take so much war, disease, famine, betrayal, heartbreak, corruption, politics, murder, and failure before I wonder if there can be a better story in which we can play our parts. My question to you, then, would be: what reason do we have to think that our life story will actually be better, that our world can actually be better, that we can actually be better?

I am looking for something really real, a hope that will not betray us. I have found something myself, which is awesome news. What hope do you have?