“There are times when I feel life coming at me in unwarranted and inexplicable ways, offering crises where my best-laid plans had promised only peace. As a Christian, I often try to make sense of those times, searching for God’s purpose among the fallout of my shattered plans, struggling to understand how God will use this one day.
As part of my never-ending quest to find those answers, I take Bible courses to help me better understand the nature of my Creator, and His interest in my life. But sometimes the more I learn about Him, the farther away He seems, and the smaller and less significant I feel. However, in a recent lesson about the dimensions in which God lives, as opposed to the dimensions I live in (width, height, depth), I began to understand that God isn’t bound by those dimensions or by time or by gravity. He lives in many more dimensions—some which my mind can’t even comprehend. He can go through walls and fly across the universe; he can hear everyone’s thoughts at once; He can know us before we’re even knit inside our mother’s womb. He is the One who builds “and breaks down nations across the world, rescues desperate and war-torn refugees, makes the sun come up each day, and keeps our feet on earth’s ground by maintaining”“maintaining the perfect gravitational force to keep us from hurling into outer space … and still He cares about the prayers of a child in his bed.
God is not bound by time or space, as I am, so my thinking about God’s dimensions is limited by my own experience. He can be everywhere at once and attend to billions of problems at once. He can be touching me and also touching you. He can be so close that His breath is sweeping my skin, yet He can be that close to you as well, even if you’re across the world from me. He can hear all my prayers and not just give me what I ask for, but thankfully, He can assess what’s best for me given His purpose for my life and the desires of my heart.
I find this comforting, especially when I pray for things and can’t see immediate answers. If I think of my life in human terms, as a parade, for instance, and God hovering over it in a helicopter, able to touch down at the beginning and the end and any point in between—seeing the end from the beginning,and the beginning from the end, and the end from the middle, then I can trust that all my prayers have been answered at some point in that timeline. My frustration at what I see as unanswered prayer is unwarranted, because He has already sent those answers even though I may not have caught up to them yet. Daniel prayed for Israel and his prayer was answered immediately, but it took three weeks before the angel came to tell him.
No one living in America can deny that our culture has changed. The drug culture alone is killing our kids. In times like these, it’s easy to throw up our hands and declare that there must not be a God, that if there were, why would He“allow people to suffer this way? Why would He allow children to be born into dysfunctional and dangerous homes? Why would He allow substances on earth that destroy us? Why would He allow such evil to hold us in bondage?
But if you see this life as a training ground for a greater purpose that has everything to do with eternity, and if you see that Jesus came to offer us an escape from the hell that was calling to us and threatening to swallow us whole, by taking the consequences of our dysfunctional, dangerous choices (which he calls sin), and enduring our punishment so that we could emerge whole and flawless, then you’ll see how everything has meaning. Everything has a purpose. You are an important part of God’s plan, and you have a purpose in His eternity. If you understand and accept that Jesus Christ took away your sin by taking it on Himself, then you too will someday live in a sinless heaven of miraculous, immeasurable dimensions—where human limitations are taken away, and nothing inhibits us from living up to our eternal purpose.
Just imagine …
Thinking that way makes my parade a lot more joyful “even when I’m at a place on the timeline where things aren’t going like I’d hoped. This place in time is not all there is to my life … or to yours.
There’s so much more.”
Excerpt From: Blackstock, Terri. “Vicious Cycle.” Zondervan, 2011. iBooks.
This material may be protected by copyright.
Posted by Kachi
No comments:
Post a Comment