Metaphor Monday

 

God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.*

 

Sometimes I despair of ever getting this thing right. And by this thing, I mean this walking out the Christian life, this working out my own salvation, this picking up my cross daily.

 

This Faith Thing.

 

More specifically, this Trust Thing.

 

I know His thoughts and ways are higher than mine by a distance of approximately earth to ionosphere x infinity, but knowing that doesn’t really make my heart ache less when testing and trials come. I’m just being honest.

 

How do you trust when you feel completely demolished? How do you trust when you have been peeled down to the bone, laid bare and open, reduced to ash and dust and tears? Okay, so you may have asked for it, but did He really have to answer with such swift violence?

 

Frankly, how do you trust when you feel picked on by God Himself? When, no matter how wrong you know it is, your image of Him through your pain is of the schoolyard bully, standing and smirking over your bruised and bleeding form with clenched fists, ready to pound again if you so much as move?

 

He does not take delight in our pain. He takes delight in our healing.

 

This He has told me. This I struggle–oh, how I struggle–to believe.

 

But I cling to the truth of it, even when my heart cries foul and my flesh cries uncle.

 

He is not a bully. He is not out to get me. He is not God of the cruel and the petty and the hurting for hurting’s sake.

 

Whatever pain afflicts me, I MUST cling to the truth that He is seeing something worth saving through it. If He strips me down to the studs, He will rebuild again. If there is rot, and termite, and cracks from building upon sand, He will make new. It is a horrible, fearful process, this soul-renovation. It is ugly.

 

But He is God of the ugly.

 

He does not shrink back from making something look worse in order to restore it to newness. Earthly restoration experts see an old building and envision what it was in its glory days…and are driven to pour money and time into bringing it back. The process is ugly. Often, worse flaws are uncovered as the plaster is torn away. The experts must decide: is the cost worth the end result? Sometimes their answer is no.

 

His answer is never no.

 

The crucifixion was the ultimate, divine YES. The price He paid covers all our restoration costs. It was the ugliest restoration project ever embarked upon. Our enemy, the earth’s foreman, told Him it wasn’t worth the trouble. He didn’t listen.

 

And sometimes, in the daily working out in me, He must use a spiritual pneumatic drill. Restoration is violent business. But I must trust that He will never destroy what is of value. He delicately plucks the holy from the profane and polishes it to a high gloss. In the midst of the dust and noise and wreckage, He knows what to save and what to abandon.

 

Often His opinion is the opposite of mine.

 

Thus, the trouble with this Trust Thing.

 

But if I listen hard enough…if my ears are tuned to a heavenly frequency…I can hear Him rejoicing over me in the midst of the jackhammer and hacksaw. If Trust is allowed to permeate my heart, the whole cacophony is transformed into a divine love song.

 

*1 Sam. 16:7