His Cross Our HopeSýnishorn

If you’ve been through a hard time in your life, raise your hand.

All of us. More than once.

We hate those times when the path is awful. Messy. Painful.

I’ve traveled those roads. When I battled a decade of debilitating fear, I once got on my knees and yelled at the ceiling, “Why won’t You fix this?” I was angry. Broken. Why would God let me suffer when He could speak a word and heal me?

Peter was in a similar boat when the soldiers and temple guards arrived with the traitor Judas to arrest Jesus. Trying to save the day, Peter swung a sword at the head of the High Priest’s servant, Malchus. Being a fisherman and not a soldier, Peter lopped off Malchus’s ear, not his head.

And Jesus rebuked Peter. Not the arresting soldiers. Not the traitor Judas. Peter. The man trying to “save” Him from suffering.

Why? Because Jesus had a job to do. If He’d allowed Peter to subvert the mission, then there’d be no cross … No redemption for humanity.

Judas and the rest were doing exactly what they were supposed to do to help Jesus defeat Satan, as strange as that seems. It was Peter who stepped out of line.

Sometimes we suffer, but looking back on those times, don’t we often see a blessing?

When we read Genesis 3:15 on day one of this Lent study, we saw how the plan looks messy, but it’s going just as it should. I look back on that decade of fear and I know… I am who I am because of that time. I walk a closer walk with God. While I wouldn’t ask to repeat the journey, I see beauty in the struggle. God was up to something in me that never would have been accomplished in another way.

When the going gets tough, we can be tempted, like Peter, to take matters into our own hands. But in good and bad, we take comfort in trusting that God works everything according to His plan. There will be blessings. We just have to wait on Him.

~Jodie Bailey

Novelist and cohost of the Faith Over Fear podcast