Why & How

God is so faithful.

He's shown me so much this morning alone about how He has been in control and how He's had His hand all over this situation - and me - even before I knew there even WAS a situation.

The single most profound revelation of the morning is this:

It's not really about the 'why' of our pain; its the 'how' that matters.

The 'why' of any pain we experience, when it's completely reduced, boils down to the fact that we are flawed creatures, living in a flawed world, trying to build lives around and with other flawed creatures. That fact alone means that at some point, by our poor choices or someone else's, we are going to experience pain. Even of the most profound sort. Maybe even at the hands of people who love us. Or maybe in the shame of us being the ones to issue the hurt to people that we love. Inevitably, pain is experienced because we are utterly human. It just is what it is.

But the 'how'... That's a whole different story. The 'how' is the way we choose to handle the pain that life throws our way. Do we try to skirt it by pretending we don't hurt? Do we look for unhealthy ways to alleviatge it? You know what I mean... drugs, alchol, sleep, food, inappropriate intimacy...  Do we turn away from God? Do we retaliate in kind? How do deal with the things that hurt?

Ya'll. That matters.

And really, if we have a hope of dealing with it in a way that allows God to call us blameless, all we can do... ALL we can do... is cling to Him. Talk to Him. Give Him the hurt and the things that come with it. Because if we don't - if we don't rest on the relationship that we are called to have with Him - we are gonna fail. And satan is gonna make sure he keeps us slaves to ourselves and our natural inability to heal our own spirits.

We all make choices in our pain and they all lead us to or away from God. We all come face-to-face with Christ and choose to stand firm or run scared in those times when everything just seems to be crushing us and fallin in our heads. Every last one of us....

It's all a matter of where our hearts lie. Do we give satan the foothold or do we invite God to do a work through our pain that equips us to edify the body - even in our own homes & families?

Somethin to think on, huh?

bye ya'll...