My Contradictions and Conundrums.

It was only to take me about a couple of sit downs, I thought; to read John Pipers' writing of The Hidden Smile of God.  Instead I found I finished it after a dozen hours of digging for answers due to the enormous amount of questions the book has elicited.

As a youngster and far into adulthood, there was an area of my life I never really was able to wrap my mental arms around. What was it going to take for me to be great?  In one ear and one eye, I heard and saw that it would be very difficult and saw the struggles it took my parents, professionals, colleagues, and other actors had to accomplish in becoming something great.  I was only assured that I would become what God wanted me to be if I worked hard, stayed within the box, playing by the rules and keeping my nose to the grindstone. Then I captured another sound and view, which was more to my liking.  A positive slogan, more or less.  I have to stop and have a good laugh here. It was like, one commentator said: "I had a thrill run up my leg."  I could hardly contain myself when it came across my spiritual radar. "God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life!" It was such a "beautiful thing!" as another present day figure, often exclaims. For numerous years this slogan meant that all my plans would be wonderful because God loved me.

Now that I'm a bit older and not so much a novas (or should say: an experienced novas), I understand that this slogan had more to do with the Christian gospel's understanding of salvation than it did with guiding me down the primrose path of life. Yet, in reading Pipers' writing of the affliction in the lives of John Bunyan, William Cowper, and David Brainerd there's still a reverberation in my soul when I experience hardship, pain, and loss. How do I square a belief in the love of God with a series of professional and personal failures and hardships? 

I confess that the seeming contradictions between stated beliefs and life experience still, sometimes, are making my faith more complicate than I would like to appreciate. For me, many of the cherished beliefs I held at one time or another, imploded, and what was once a fortress, for a time, came crashing down as life experiences smashed up against them like a Viking battering ram. In the aftermath, far too many times, I have been left with  alternative shelters of cynical doubt or, at times, blind faith beckoned. Finding myself in this predicament, how many times have I run perilously between both extremes, without a strong sense of security that my fortress once provided? 

Yet there are so many of my acquaintances and dear friends, past and present, who have experienced these same difficult conflicts between what was once held to be the truth and what has been experienced in life. Knowing this gives me comfort that I am not alone. I am reminded of the biblical narrative of Joseph as one example. He was told by God through a sequence of dreams that he would be great one day—so great, in fact that his own brothers would come and bow down in reverence for him. He had been given a glimpse of his destiny as God's dearly loved child, and perhaps he believed his path to that destiny would be paved with gold. Instead, his gilded trip to glory turned into an attempted murder by his own brothers, his enslavement, and spending a portion of his life in prison having been falsely accused of various crimes he did not commit. In all my years past I do not remember asking: how could this be the path to glory God supposedly promised to provide for Joseph? 

Joseph's trust in a God who loved him and had compassion on him was now being challenged by this confusing demonstration of divine care. Sitting in his jail cell, I cant believe that Joseph did not wondered about his dreams of glory as he grappled with his nightmarish existence. How could things go so badly for one who put his trust in a loving God? 

The story of Joseph's life ends up in glory. Made second in command of all of Egypt, his position ultimately saves his family and the people of Israel from famine and starvation. Despite the contradiction between his life experience and what he thought he knew about God, Joseph came to affirm that God is good and trustworthy. How did he arrive at this conclusion? 

I know………….. the narrative doesn't state this explicitly, it's hard for me to imagine that Joseph didn't wrestle with God during all that time in prison. Like his father Jacob, Joseph wrestled with God in the seemingly contradictory details of his life experience. In the process of this wrestling, God gave him a new perspective and a deeper understanding. But I notice that the  new perspective was not lightly gained. Craig Barnes in his book: When God Interrupts expertly describes the emergence of new perspectives as the very process of total conversion:

"The deep fear behind every loss is that we have been abandoned by the God who should have saved us. The transforming moment in Christian conversion comes when we realize that even God has left us. We then discover it was not God, but our image of God that abandoned us.... Only then is change possible."

Yes, Joseph reveals his new perspective to his brothers who betrayed him: "As for you, you meant evil against me but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive." I've found afresh that this is no biblical cliché. Joseph did witness God's intervention and care. But not in the way he expected. So ( I have just used "so" to begin a sentence with, I must learn to overlook the popularity of it being the social norm, these days; which I despise )  …… if I know intuitively that life doesn't always go as planned, perhaps, at seventy three I too am able to gain a new perspective and a new vision as a result of wrestling through the contradictions and conundrums.

Perhaps as we realize that though our image of God has abandoned us, the real God will yet be revealed. It is a perspective not easily gained and it may not come from our eyes, but from God's eyes. 

Father, God,  My image of You has not abandoned me in the least and realize that the real You has yet to be revealed.  I confess, not by any means, has been a perspective easily gained.  I also understand that it may not come from my eyes, but from Yours.  Amen