Through the Trial
Something I did not know about faith is that the process is not designed to just lead you automatically to the object you desire. When I started working on Faith Maps, I knew there might be a couple hiccups along the way, but I really thought it was supposed to almost immediately lead to what I was hoping to achieve. I thought believing in the God of the impossible was the end goal. So if I just believed God could do the impossible then He would bring it about if it was His will to do so. But I didn’t consider that the process would produce something in me that God desired as well.
The more I study some of these Old Testament stories, the more I see that the struggles are designed to refine the one God was engaging with, in order to help them look more like God. Faith is as much and more about discovering Who God is then it is about us receiving the desires of our hearts. Not because He does not care about the physical things we desire, but because ultimately He is the deepest desire of our heart, and sometimes it takes the struggle to reveal that.
So when Moses wound up in exile, this had to be a big blow to him. Believing God had called him to deliver Israel from Egypt, and then being so far removed from the situation that he could not even help with their burden would have felt like complete and total failure to Moses. How could God have called him to this situation and then let him fail so utterly?
I think from a human perspective this would have been a devastating blow. Moses lived 40 years in exile. When I think of the deliverance of God, sometimes I see that there was a mighty struggle in it. Like with the Israelites facing their greatest fear right before God parts the Red Sea. But Moses lived 40 years in a setting where it looked like he could never recover from his failure. God didn’t come back 3 days later after he fled into exile and said ok it’s time. It was 4 decades before God came to get Moses. And Moses couldn’t have just tried to go back before then. It actually was important for Moses to recognize his failure, because people were waiting to kill him back in Egypt. So if he had tried to move before God came to get him, there could have been fatal consequences.
I guess that’s just surprising to me, because when I think of faith, even in God doing the impossible, I don’t think there is going to be that big of a time lapse before God moves. But Moses’ story proves that sometimes it takes a long time before God acts. So this I think is where the value of Faith Maps comes in, because it is the process of learning to depend upon the faithfulness of God. It shifts the thinking from what is happening to a higher way of thinking.
If I am stuck on an outcome-something I believed God was going to do, but something that now actually is impossible, and it is years from coming about, how do I have faith in that season? The thing I thought God was going to deliver on has now become an impossibility. And now I am living in a season, that I am unable to reconcile on my own insight. So what do I do now?
This is where shifting our focus from what we understand to asking God to reconcile the situation for us comes in. God is not looking to leave us in a devastated position for decades, even if His solution is not going to come into play in the immediate future. There was always this thought that God could turn things around in an instant-which is absolutely true, but what if that instant is not going to be today, or tomorrow, but years down the road? It can wear us down emotionally, but even more it can wear our faith down to be waiting for something just around the bend, if His answer is actually years down the road.
My vantage point here is not to just stop hoping, but rather to seek more of His presence in this season. The Lord has so many ways to allow us to persevere in tough situations. He gives comfort. He brings healing. He restores other places in our lives in need of restoration. But mostly He walks with us. He builds a life with us, where He is our refuge, our joy, our strength. He becomes our lifeline and is greater than our physical needs. I believe God ultimately will bring about even a physical redemption for our individual stories today. And I think it is wonderful to hope for that day. But whether that day of redemption is near or far, the entire process is made not only doable, but enjoyable as God shares in all the aspects of our day to day. May you experience the joy of His presence today.
