This past week was rough. Like, this-is-stupid-and-I-hate-everything kind of rough. To be quite honest, I’m a pretty tough cookie. I’m resilient. I know how to persevere. But this week made me tired. Not the exhausted kind of tired. No, we’re talking about being mentally, spiritually and emotionally fed up. I was mad. And by golly, I let the Lord know it. Here’s the short and less colorful version of what I said to Him: Why does everything have to feel like a life lesson? Why does one sorrow feed into another sorrow? One disappointment into the next? One long season of waiting inevitably leading into an even longer season of waiting? Why is life so relentless and arbitrarily difficult? Is this fun for You?! How do I reconcile this with the fact that I believe that You [God] are good? How is this good? You’re not good. You’re a jerk – and I’m just part of some epic cosmic joke…”
I should note here that before, during and after my tirade, I wasn’t interested in His response. I wasn’t interested in a conversation. I wasn’t interested in what He had to say. I know the right answers—and I was 100% not interested in them. For 24 hours, I willfully told the Lord “I’m not interested…” fully anticipating the moment where He would step in and say, “My turn…”
He didn’t.
Today, I was sitting in my car on my way to do some shopping—less angry and more open, but still not ready to engage in a discussion—and I teared up and said out loud “I just don’t understand.” Do you want to know what He said in that moment? After I’d ranted angrily (and steadily) for the last day? After I told Him not to talk to me because I wasn’t interested in anything that He had to say?
“I’m making you more like Me.”
God is not the jerk. I am.
So, I’ve been thinking about that phrase pretty steadily for the last 12 hours now. And it’s broken my heart several times. Here’s why:
Genesis 1 tells us that we’ve been made in the image of God. Characteristically. Emotively. We choose, and think and feel to the degree that we do because He does. We can feel because He does. We celebrate, delight and feel absurd amounts of joy because He does. We understand anger, sorrow and disappointment because He does. Of course, we were never originally supposed to feel those things—but sin is an issue, and so here we are.
God gets angry. And disappointed. And sad. Man of sorrows, acquainted with grief—remember? And, guys, we’re the source of that grief. Us. His creation that willfully chooses everything but Him. He would be fully within His rights as Creator and Sustainer of the entire universe to just be done with us. Deal with His anger/sadness/disappointment and move right along to the next thing. But He doesn’t—and THAT is what I’ve been thinking about all day. THAT is why my heart has broken several times today.
1 John 4 tells us that God is love. 1 Corinthians 13 spells out the definition of love. It suffers long. It’s kind. It bears all things. Believes all things. It endures all things. We’ve all been to weddings—we know what love is. But I would like to take these two chunks of scripture and follow them to their logical conclusion. If God is love, then God is long-suffering. God is kind. God is not irritable or resentful. God bears all things. God endures all things. He does not leave us to ourselves—He invites us out of our brokenness and into relationship with Him. And in that relationship, He makes us more like Himself. This is sanctification—the process of being made more like Him because He loves us.
The Lord knows what it is like to live through the arbitrariness that is everyday living. He knows what sorrow feels like. And loneliness. And weariness. And He recognizes those feelings in us. I’m not here to tell you that when you are experiencing relentless hardship in your life, it’s just the Lord trying to help you grow. What I am trying to tell you is that when you are facing these things—day after day, year after year—the Lord is there whispering in your ear “I know. I know you. I see you. I hear you. I love you. Let me teach you. Let me teach you my patience. Let me teach you my kindness. Let me teach you what it is to bear all things and endure. Let me teach you how to love like me. Let me make you more like me…” Over, and over, and over again—until the day when we’re all poured out, and we stand in front of Him face to face and He says (with a pretty epic hug) “You made it. You finished the race. Well done.”
Hebrews 10:39 says it pretty well while talking about endurance, “We are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed…” We keep going. We keep going in the midst of trial and difficulty and pain, holding on to the fact that we are not alone. We have each other. But more than that, we have the Lord who endures with us to the end quietly saying along the way, “Keep going. I’m making you more like Me.”