I Believe in God. Why is My Life Falling Apart?

THE OVERTURE

Your feet imprint the dirt path as you take each step across the plain. A dust devil swirls and lifts, then propels its load toward you. Jerking your arm up to protect your face has little effect. The sand is all. Filling your mouth, nostrils. Blinding with grit. Choking you with thirst.

Do you suppose this is part of Jesus’ experience when the Holy Spirit drives him into the wilderness? (Mk 1:12). Not guided. No suggested itinerary. But driven.

Driven to meet wild beasts. Hunger, Thirst. Loneliness. And after forty days and nights of this, comes temptation by the devil.

Apparently the Holy Spirit has no hesitation getting to the heart of the matter: Will you be true to the Lord your God, even when life gets impossible?

Because when you give your life to Christ, the Holy Spirit enters your being as the Father’s driving power.

The consequences are disconcerting. Uncontrollable, even. Frequently you are driven to face the force of a sandstorm. And stopped in your tracks.

This is not a life of obvious glory. 

Father, you say. How can I be in your will when my life is falling apart?

Finally, you wonder: Lord God, what do you really want from me?

Ah, replies the Holy Spirit. Thank you for asking. Please hear what is in my heart for you:

Ho, come! Thirst for me. Learn to know me as I know you. For if you surrender in your weakness, and love the Lord your God, I have the power to bless you with wholeness (Isaiah 55:1-2; 60:22).

Wholeness?

Yes. Wholeness.

Through my refining fire, grow more like Christ. More your own true self. Mature in loving God and others as you love yourself (Luke 10:27).

You pause. Then: I think I understand, Lord. You want me to confront myself, to assess my beliefs, and improve my relationships with others, and with God.

You recognize the challenge. You see there will still be tribulation. How else can one turn away from the human temptation of self will? Of sorting out how to live in a fallen world?

Yet you recall: When Jesus rebukes the devil, when he rejects the external temptations of glory, at last the angels come. The angels come and surround him. They minister to his needs and comfort him (Matthew 4:11).

Sent by the Father, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit, now part of your spiritual core, asserts power on your behalf.

All the while driving you deeper into the Trinity way.

The Triune God. Who will be taken seriously. Even in the 21^st century.

TRUSTING IN THE TRINITY

Cast All Your Cares on Jesus

Jesus Christ takes as much personal interest in you as he did in his disciples.

Do you remember the time when Peter felt all knotted up about paying the Roman taxes? He blurted out, “Hey Lord, if we don’t come up with some money, they’ll toss us in jail!”

Jesus told him to go catch a fish.

I’m sure Peter was scratching his head while threading a worm on the hook. But he did as the Master said. Before long, he caught a fish. “Okay,” Peter said, holding the wiggly creature out to Jesus. “Now what?”

”Look in his mouth and pay our taxes with what you find there.”

Can you imagine Peter’s expression? Between the two of them, he was the expert fisherman. He’d caught and cleaned thousands of fish, and never once had loose change appeared in their innards. Despite his doubts, Peter propped open the fish’s mouth and gave the creature a hearty shake. Out popped a coin that exactly covered the taxes.

 

What worked for Peter will work for you. Not the fish part, but going straight to Jesus when you face a baffling dilemma.

Mel, my brother-in-law and lifelong buddy, invited me out for lunch to discuss such a dilemma. “Dan, I’m in a bind. I’ve contracted my summer camp out to a university football team that’ll arrive next Monday. I told the coach a year ago that they could use an acre on the south lot as a practice field. But I hadn’t counted on the spring rains. When I went out yesterday to check on the field, the grass had grown a mile high!”

 

“We could try my lawn mover,” I said.

“The grass is too thick and tall. The engine would burn up.”

“How about renting a tractor?”

“The soil is too moist. It would leave ruts in the field.”

“A scythe?”

“That would take all summer. There’s just no way to get that grass cropped short in time.”

“How about asking Jesus for a creative idea?”

Mel’s eyes narrowed. “Right,” he said, smiling. “Like, ‘Hey God, could you please fix my green acre by next Monday?’”

I smiled back. My suggestion did sound naive. We said goodbye, but the story doesn’t end there.

 

Let’s allow an invisible camera to follow Mel up the winding mountain road to Western Life Camp.He is carrying groceries for the football camp into a cold storage unit, where he finds himself saying a little prayer.“Lord, if you do have an idea for cutting the grass, I’d love to hear about it.”

The food packed away, Mel saunters over to the woodpile to chop some firewood. Axe raised, poised for the first strike, he hears an inner voice that says, “Okay.”

“Okay what?” he thinks to himself.

“Okay, Mel,” says the still small voice. “I have an idea.”

Lowering the axe, he takes a seat on a nearby stump and waits attentively. A minute passes. Then he hears, “Go tell your neighbor Joe that you’ve got an acre of tall grass that needs clearing. Do whatever he tells you.”

Mel feels torn between continuing to cut wood and doing what the voice has instructed. He wonders if Joe will think he’s foolish. But an image of the football coach yelling, “Where’s my field!” spurs him into action.

Mel drives over and finds Joe watering a half-dozen horses at a trough. After a short greeting Mel tells Joe about his dilemma over the acre of grass.

 

Joe says, “Why, that’s no problem. My horses are running low on feed and I don’t have time to go into town for hay. If you’ll let them graze that acre, we’ll all be happy.”

When the football team arrived on Monday, Mel walked the coach over for a look at the field. The coach knelt down and ran his palm over the perfectly manicured grass. “This will do nicely,” he said.

 

It isn’t easy to bring something to God’s attention when you feel like you should solve it yourself. On the other hand, God is a genius at developing creative responses to life’s perplexing crises. Like Peter and Mel, you can increase your resourcefulness by “casting all your care on Him, for He cares for you (1 Peter 5:7).