Life Can Hurt
Life can hurt. Life can be disappointing. Life can bring hard situations. Why does a loving God allow these things to touch His children? I believe there are three reasons or explanations that we can fit almost all of life’s trials into:
God is intentionally taking us through something hard in order to grow and stretch our faith and trust in Him.
Ten months ago, I started going to the gym and hired a personal trainer. My personal trainer, Lisa, knows everything that I don’t about muscles, joints, nutrition, and even my own limitations. There are days where I hurt (almost EVERY day). There are days where I think I can’t do another rep. There are days where I don’t even want to walk through the door of the gym because I know it will be hard; BUT I’m getting stronger, I’m losing inches, I have more energy. All the things that are supposed to happen when someone begins to work out are happening to me. In the same way that I trust Lisa to know what my body needs, I have had to learn to trust God with my spiritual growth and fitness. God knows what I need. He knows my limitations. Sometimes He allows us to endure hard things in order to make us stronger.
2. Sometimes we go through hard times because we make bad choices and there are consequences to our decisions.
As a therapist, I often deal with man-made chaos (or woman-made). Generations of dysfunction bring relationship problems that are so far from what God desires for human interaction to be; yet, we don’t recognize the role we play in multiplying that dysfunction. Someone might go through a financial hardship because they never learned how to budget effectively. Someone might go through a medical scare or hardship because they haven’t taken care of their body. One might have difficult teenagers because there was inconsistency or too much freedom given when the children were young. You might even find yourself living the tough consequences of someone ELSE’S sin! Valuable life lessons can be learned from consequences; hopefully each time we endure this type of “hard time,” a lesson is learned and we are stronger for having gone through it.
3. Sometimes we go through hard times simply because we are fallen human beings temporarily living in a broken world.
When my children were young, we liked to go to the playground. Inevitably, one of them would get hurt. They would cry, I would pick them up, love on them, kiss their “boo-boo” and send them back out to play. Their hurt was never because I caused it; it was never because I wasn’t paying attention. It certainly wasn’t because I didn’t love them! They got hurt because they were children on a playground. As long as we live in this world, we are “children on a playground.” Sometimes, God’s children get cancer. Sometimes God’s children are abused or neglected. Sometimes, God’s children lose loved ones. This does NOT happen because God caused it, or He wasn’t paying attention, and CERTAINLY not because He doesn’t love us. John 16:33 reminds us that we WILL have troubles while living on this earth, but God has overcome the world! An eternal perspective helps us to fell less overwhelmed with the hard things of this temporary earth and this temporary body.
So, my friend, whatever it is you’re going through, maybe fitting it into one of these three categories will help you to endure it better. If God is growing you, thank Him for the opportunity for growth. If you’ve made bad decisions, learn a lesson and do better next time. If you’re simply a “child on a playground,” keep that eternal perspective and remind yourself that “this world is not my home, I’m just a passing through!”