Tuesday’s Thinking Out Loud
Coffee Hour @ Chicklit Power…
Welcome to Tuesday’s “Thinking out Loud”! This is a fun series that I post periodically as I look through my Facebook newsfeed. I found this post a few weeks back and thought its timing would be great today as the holidays are zooming in all around us! Grab your coffee and join us for some thinking out loud by Diane Huntsman!
I am all about the family picture life. I have faithfully gathered my brood together once a year for the annual family pic’… for YEARS! There is only one request I make of each person in my family: that they make every effort to be available for this event.
There have been some photo shoots that my son literally pulls up from a long drive from Santa Barbara with surfer bed head, arriving moments before the scheduled photo shoot…but I never care what he looks like, as long as he makes it!
As I’m making my plans for this year’s Huntsman photo extravaganza, I begin to plan for the backdrop; it’s every bit as important as the subjects in the pic’, don’t you think? I want beauty behind us, something unique.
As I’m thinking about backdrops for family photos, I can’t help but think about the backdrops of our lives. I don’t want an ordinary family photo, and I certainly don’t want an ordinary life, boring and full of predictable play-outs. But I certainly don’t want pain and affliction either! But wait, aren’t those the very things that can turn ordinary into extraordinary? It’s the pain, the days met head-on with suffering that drop us to our knees and cause us to cry out: “GOD, I NEED YOU!!! Rescue me! Meet me! Deliver me! Teach me what it is I am to learn through this dark hour. And in the crashing waves and gasping for breath moments, He shows up. He meets us, rescues us by granting us strength to swim. He doesn’t take away the pounding waves, but He gives us the grace to swim and stay afloat.
In time, He sends a life boat and we are taken to shore and get to experience reprieve from those crashing waves that cause us to cry out, question with things like: “Why do some people get to have tons of kids while others are left barren?” Or, “Why does one person get healed from Cancer and the other one dies?” Oh, and “Why do parents lose kids to death or to this world of lies and sin and others swim through life with ease and blessings?”
I DO NOT KNOW!!! I scream at the same injustices while in the midst of them but then I have to look to heaven and know that the God who made me also makes the backdrop of my life, and yours. And in that backdrop of beauty there is tons of painful threads woven through to make it beautiful, because if I don’t have pain, if I don’t have loss, if I don’t have lack in my life, I don’t need nor do I want Jesus. And then, ultimately, I will look to my own efficiencies, my own successes, my own agendas and ignore the One who breathed life into me 47 years ago.
It is in my weaknesses that I am made strong in His strength [2nd Corinthians 12:8-10] and when I understand that, the painful threads in the backdrop of life become beautiful, vivid with grace and love, unconditional love.
This fallen world will always have suffering, my friend. Just because we suffer doesn’t mean He doesn’t care or hasn’t seen our afflictions for our sufferings are opportunities to trust Jesus to make something beautiful out of the ashes of pain…to be able to walk through that same suffering with someone else, to hold their hand, to share in their tears, to understand like no other person what they feel. God intended that we would comfort others with the comfort we’ve been given [2nd Corinthians 1:3-5], pointing them to heaven with these words…our suffering is for a time, but paradise awaits us, and for all eternity we will be pain free and we will know joy unspeakable.
Our temporary sufferings will not compare to the glory which shall be revealed in us!! Pain and suffering lead us to the Rock that is our stability, to the One who is our comfort in the dreadful pain we run from. I hate pain! I want things my way, but I can’t have that beautiful backdrop in my life without it.
So with arms stretched high, I surrender all and say, make my life something beautiful to the praise and glory of Jesus Christ. Let’s clasp hands and walk through the pain together, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith as He paints the beautiful backdrop of our lives.
From my heart to yours,
Diane
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