Dear Friends,
Jeremiah knew about inner turmoil. “I have been deprived of peace,” the prophet
records in Lamentations 3:17. Peace is
not a fuzzy feeling. Peace is, as
Augustine put it, “the tranquility of order.”
When my spirit is out of order and I am falling apart on the inside and
blaming God for it, I am probably suffering a bad case of faith distress. There is an uneasy awareness that things are
not the way they ought to be. My world
is seriously out of sync, and I feel a real resentment toward God. It is
his fault, we tell ourselves.
This trouble happened on His
watch. He is the robber; I am the
robbed.
A friend of mine had been sexually abused when she was a
small child. As she struggled to make
sense of what God had allowed to happen to her, she got God and life mixed up
and ended up in a great state of spiritual confusion.
“What is your concept of God?” I asked her.
“At first,” she replied, “I found it difficult to believe
that He even existed. But I knew that
was silly because I knew He did. Then I
really had a problem! It was easier to
believe that He wasn’t there than
that He was! If He was, how could He stand by in a corner
of the room with His hands in his pockets?
What sort of a God is He? How could
He do this to me?”
But it wasn’t God who had abused her; it was her
father. And God had delivered her out of
the situation in a remarkable way. God
was not the robber.
When you face such inner turmoil, you need to talk to God
about it, for ultimately only He can make sense of it. Only He can restore your faith.
Blessings,
Jill Briscoe
Executive Editor
Just Between Us
Magazine
A-men.
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