Stop Telling Me What It Is For

Four people now.

The first was at the hospital, in the corridor, before he had even told his own mother. A good man, and he said something about how God does not waste anything, and then he squeezed his shoulder and went to get his car.

The second was a card. The third was at church, sideways, in the way people do it when they are frightened of you.

The fourth was on Tuesday, and the fourth was the one that finished something, because the fourth was somebody he loves, and she said, with tears in her eyes and genuinely meaning it as a gift, that she believed God was going to use this.

And he said thank you. He has said thank you four times.

He is fifty eight. He has been a Christian since he was nineteen, and he is not in a crisis of faith; he prayed properly this morning and meant it. He is simply out of ways to be gracious about being explained to.

Because underneath all four of those sentences is the same thing, and he has finally been able to name it: every one of them requires that God arranged this. And nobody has asked him whether he can hold that. They have just handed it to him with both hands and a kind face.

If somebody has told you what your worst thing is for, you know exactly what I mean.

What can honestly be said

Let me be exact about what I am doing here, because you have had four people who were not.

I do not know why you are ill. I am not going to tell you what God is teaching you, or what He will use, or what season this is. I was not there when it was decided, and neither was the man in the corridor, and neither was the woman on Tuesday who loves you.

I want to be careful with them, because you love them and I am not going to make them villains. Most people who say those sentences are frightened, and a reason is a rail on a stair, and they grabbed one and passed it to you because they could not bear to stand there with nothing.

But they handed you an explanation you did not ask for and cannot verify, and you have been carrying it politely.

Here is what can be said, and it is not a reason. It is a position.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee.Isaiah 43:2

Read what the verse promises and, just as carefully, what it does not.

It does not say there will be no water. It does not explain the water. It does not say the water was sent, or is teaching you something, or has a purpose you will see later. It says one thing: when you go through it, He is there.

You are in water that God is in with you, and He did not require it to have a meaning before He got in. That is not my comfort. It is written in Isaiah 43:2, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

So three months of thank you have not been faithlessness. You have had Him in this with you since the corridor, and the being with was never waiting on you accepting an explanation. The word settled that long before the scan, and the same Spirit who inspired it is on that porch while you read this.

You are allowed to not have a theology of it yet

Here is what I want to hand you, and it is smaller and more useful than an answer.

You do not have to resolve the question of what God is doing in order to keep going with Him. That is the thing all four of those sentences quietly assume, and it is not true, and Scripture is full of people who kept walking with God while entirely unresolved about His reasoning.

Job never got an explanation. He got God, in person, asking him questions about the sea and the horse, and he said afterward that this was enough, and the reader is never told why any of it happened.

So when the fifth person says it, and there will be a fifth, you are allowed to say: I do not know what it is for, and I am not looking for that today. That is a complete and faithful sentence and it does not require a footnote.

You have permission to hold the not knowing, and the permission is already given rather than earned by working out an acceptable account of it. Isaiah 43 puts Him in the river without a word of explanation for the river; His Spirit is the one who makes a man able to stand in an unexplained thing and still pray in the morning.

One plain word, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If the weight has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and if you are in danger right now, use your emergency number. That is not a failure of faith. It is what a person does when the ground goes.