Trusting God in Challenging CircumstancesSýnishorn

Pain Leads Us to God

No human being healthy in mind, body, and spirit enjoys pain. By its very definition pain causes distress, disruption, and dysfunction. Whether acute with the sharp intensity of a blade stabbing through your body or chronic with the dull, unbearable ambience of constant paper cuts, pain directs our attention to the location of our wounding. 

The coronavirus, its devastating economic impact, and all the unrest and turmoil our nation and our world has faced has left all of us reeling in the agony of a comprehensive assault. The uncertainty of its approach, the duration of its attack, and its uncompromising assassination of hope left us gasping in ways few people alive in the world today have ever experienced. Leaders we trusted seemed to know less than we did. Organizations and institutions disintegrated into anarchies and oligarchies. As we wondered how we would pay our bills and provide for our families, we felt orphaned and isolated, left without resources in a world depleted and exhausted. 

But for all of their crushing destruction and lingering effects, the circumstances of the recent past have an eternally significant silver lining: We have nowhere to run except to God. 

When times are good and our families are healthy and our jobs secure, when we’re enjoying an abundance of God’s blessings to the point that we’ve come to feel entitled to them, when we slip into old ways of thinking that we can control our lives, there’s only one way to get our attention. Because when we lose something or someone, when the future we had mapped out suddenly vanishes in a matter of minutes, then we realize just how little control we have over anything in our lives. We recognize our limitations in these mortal bodies and turn back to the omniscient, all-powerful, almighty God, Creator of heaven and earth.