Count It All Joy

And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and make you strong, firm, and steadfast.

1 Peter 5:10 NIV

Although we lost everything in Hurricane Harvey, God showed me what we still had was actually the most important thing in life—we'd escaped with our lives. Learning to count even your suffering as joy is pleasing to God. 

Did you catch that? Peter said, “After you’ve suffered a little while.” If you’re like the old me, you’d rather do without that part about suffering, thank you very much. But over the last years, God has fast-tracked me and taken me on a whirlwind ride like nothing I could have ever dreamed up. 

Are you familiar with the term “apprehend?” It’s a word used in law enforcement, like when a police officer apprehends a criminal. It means to arrest, seize, grasp, or capture. Well, after living a life on the jagged edge for 20 years dealing drugs and causing destruction everywhere I went, that’s what God did to me. He apprehended me—grasped me out of a life racing headlong toward hell and put me on a new path. On this new path, I was rescued from my storm and healed by Jesus. 

God brought my perspective back into alignment with truth: God is our everything. We might fear losing everything because we misplace our identity in things that are not of Christ. But in reality, we are not losing at all because worldly things are merely material possessions or a relationship that you shouldn’t have gotten into. 

Would you still rely upon God if you lost every single thing but your life? It’s hard to say for some people, but until you’re faced with it, you don’t really know what your perspective would be. Unless of course, you cling to Jesus each and every day, whether you’re in a storm or not. 

God uses situations in our life to remind us that He is everything. This was my proving ground, what I like to call a heart check, also known as "the test." God used the reality of losing it all to bring about a greater eternal perspective: He is everything in my life, and storms will always come and go but He will always remain the same.

Call to action

When was your last storm in life and what did it teach you about God?