Looking For Trouble

Thoughts are bursting out from my soul like popcorn. 

Just returned from a powerful, deep, five-hour(!) seminar entitled "Suffering for the Sake of the Body," and I feel compelled to wrestle with what I just consumed. Or one point, anyhow, since I can't go every direction at once.

Cognitively, I understand that suffering is a part of being a follower of Christ.  I'm glad that God in His Word prepares us for difficult times, telling us not to be surprised when they arrive.  And I'm even more grateful for His many promises that no pain experienced on this earth can outweigh the eternal future He's prepared for us.  I'm well aware that God often does His deepest, most profound works in us through suffering.

At smoother times of my life, however, this knowledge has left me with a question: If I'm not suffering much right now, should I be seeking suffering?  Should I, for God's glory and my own growth, be trying to make my life harder?

I remembered today that I wrestled with this question much of my senior year of college. After four years at an Christian college in an urban setting, sitting in chapels every day about pouring one's life out for God, I'd acquired a sense that there were (mostly difficult) places which were more meaningful in God's kingdom than others, and that the work done there was more significant to Him.

I wasn't in those places, but I had an idea that I was supposed to be, probably teaching middle-school somewhere in the inner city. Getting in there and doing what REALLY mattered.  Suffering through the grimmest situations and seeing God work.

Then I got a job in a suburban Christian school teaching first grade, which I had viewed as both easy and insignificant. I knew God had directed me there, but didn't expect it to be difficult.

And then, every day for the first two months, I thought I was going to die – or at least fail dramatically. For all the success I had experienced in college and even in student teaching, I was ill-prepared for the way it demanded so much more than I had to give.

In the big scheme of things, the suffering was small. I know this. For the first time in my life, however, I experienced what it was to be perpetually empty in a situation which requires you to be perpetually full.   And this pushed me toward God like nothing in my life had before.

Previously, I'd measured my status before God by my own contributions to the relationship.  Desperation and brokenness, however, swept my feet out from beneath me, and I discovered that I didn't stand before God based on my work. I stood before Him as His child based on who He is and what Christ has done on my behalf.  For the first time, I rested truly on Him, and found Him to be enough.

 I wouldn't trade that year for anything.  

 I've faced much more difficult situations since then, and never once because I was looking for pain.  Simply following Jesus where He's led has, at times, put me in places where I've been called upon to screw my faith deeper into Him than it was before.  

Knowing this, then, I'm not going to be a spiritual tornado-chaser. I am, however, challenged today to follow Christ ever closer, trusting that wherever He brings me -even if it hurts!- will be for His glory and my good.

 "... for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me." 2 Timothy 1:12