Bad Eyes & Boundaries
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I feel like there is no end in sight. Whether it be sitting in traffic or bearing down through a difficult trial, situations I find myself in have the tendency to make me shortsighted until all I see is this predicament that I am in. I have really bad shortsighted eyes, so this hits home for me. If your have perfect vision, you can leave. Just kidding, please stay.
What can we learn from going through hard stuff? Yes, we learn what perseverance and hope means. We can acquaint ourselves better with the importance of companionships and sound advice. Trials for me serve as a mirror where I can see all the areas that need improvement, but also as a way to glance back without turning back to see how far I’ve come. Tribulations reveal our pain threshold and just how much we were created to handle. Goodness, when you’re in it, though… it sucks.
Suh duh, @andrewunderscoreamargo.
Recently, I flew out to Great Lakes to witness my brother Andrew graduate from Navy Boot Camp. The graduation was an emotional ceremony that honorably welcomed these brave men and women into the most powerful navy in the world. After eight weeks of handwritten letters and limited communication, it was great to finally reconnect with Andrew. He had endless stories to tell and a lot that he couldn’t tell. A lot of what he said still remains with me, but a few thoughts still come to mind even now (and I succinctly paraphrase): “It sucked. Bootcamp sucked so bad. When you’re in it, it feels like it will never end. This is it. This is my life. There were times that I was ready to quit. And then I thought about dad, Itang, and all the uncles who have all gone through this. They made it. I even asked God to somehow put me to sleep for the rest of the term and wake me up when it’s graduation day. Then graduation happened.” Then he repeated a phrase he found etched in a compartment bathroom: “This is the worst decision I ever made… until graduation.”
This makes me think of two things:
- To everything, there is a season.
- While spending eight weeks working a comfortable job, going on vacation, and taking periodic Disney trips, your brother is agonizing through boot camp, enduring intense physical and psychological obstacles, and mortifying any inkling of self left within him.
So, yeah. Instant guilt, right? Sobering, too.
We have all been through seasons of crippling torment, battling the elements of life and living out our consequences and the consequences of others. Some of us have endured heartache, depression, poverty, abandonment, abuse, cancer treatments, and the like. While we are in the middle of these seasons, we feel like we will never see the end. There are love ones that have gone before us that saw the end of their lives before the end of their struggle.
The truth that remains is this: God is the Author and Finisher of our faith. He has set a boundary on all creation (Acts 17:26). He tells the oceans where to stop (Job 38:8-11). Everything we consider to be a huge and infinite expanse is measured with His hand (Isaiah 40:12). The difficult things and even the seemingly evil things that go down in this life have a limit and answer only to the sovereignty of God. At the end of the day, and you will see an end to it all, the intensity and duration of your current trial is totally subject to your loving Creator and the purpose He wants to accomplish in your life. I'm mostly talking to myself because of current internal battles that are raging, so here it goes: Lean into it. Lean into the trial. Don't let up for a second. Though it's hard and sometimes it all feels unfair, fall back on the truth that God is good. This is all for His glory and your good.
The Lord ordains the flames we pass through to prove genuine faith, and all the while He walks with us. Not only that, He has already gone before us. Christ Himself stood every test and obediently walked through sorrow, abandonment, hunger, thirst, homelessness, physical torment, persecution, suffering wrongly, and death. Why? To accomplish what He loves--redemption of souls and creation to the praise and glory of God. By what means? Pure obedience to His Father to accomplish the grand work of salvation.
That's just it though, isn't it? We forget that we are promised an end to all things that suck and that He has set a boundary around all that we see. The book of Revelation is bursting with themes and scenes of Christ restoring all things to Himself, and every tear will be wiped away. All things will be made new. Because of all of this, we don't trudge around and drag our feet like people who don't have any hope. Read an epistle, any epistle, and you will meet with men and women who have gone before who awaited a promise and stood steadfast until either (1) Christ returned or (2) they met Him in eternity. You'll also find that they didn't go quietly. They lived boldly even in the midst of severe persecution and unjust governments. They looked forward to an unshakeable, everlasting Kingdom.
This hope is for us to cling to today. God will not have you walk in what He hasn't already walked through. Christ Himself finished the race in glory, and He is with you right now as you run yours. He has set a boundary around your suffering and you will see an end to it. In the meantime, make the trial your friend because it's helping you be more like Christ. This season you are in is specifically prescribed with His more-than-sufficient grace that you may decrease and Christ in you, the hope of glory, will be more clearly seen. The hard times have a limit, but God's love for you has absolutely no bounds.