I appologize for not updating sooner, but from the time i returned until now i’ve been preparing and sending my visa application, in addition to getting all my medical paperwork together (including doctor visits) and working on flights. However, i think the most important happening is what i heard a short while ago in a sermon. It’s the sort of thing you hear once in a while, but that keeps you thinking for a very long time. Let me type out verbatim the part of the sermon that’s been on my heart:
“I know a man whose daughter, age 14, almost 15, lost her best friend to cancer. This was a christian family, and the lass greived pretty well and thought a lot of things through and talked about it openly. Some months later the father was going through his daughter’s room and heard her sobbing. He knocked on the door and went in, gave her a hug and said ‘come on, tell me about it.’ She said ‘daddy, God could have saved my best friend. But he didnt. And i hate him,’ and burst into tears. He hugged her, stroaked her hair and said to her ‘i’m glad you told me–you might as well, because God knows what you’re thinking in any case–no point pretending. But before you ascribe malice to God, I want you to ask yourself two questions: 1. Do you want a God like the genie in Aliddan’s Lamp? Very powerful, can do absolutely anything, make everything turn out right, BUT, is always under the control of whomever rubs the lamp? Or is the God of the Bible bigger than that, and will sometimes do things you do not understand. 2. More important yet, how will you measure this God’s love? From the perspective of whether or not everything runs honkey-dorey in your life, or by the measure of a little hill outside Jerusalem? You lost your friend. God lost his Son. In fact, he didn’t loose him, he gave him. And when the whole world comes down on you, and you are in the throws of a wretched divorce; when you are facing death itself; when you’ve lost a spouse; when it doesnt seem like there is any way forward HOW WILL YOU MEASURE THE LOVE OF GOD? Listen: he chose in all of his soverignty to give us new birth by the gospel. You will go back, and you will hang onto the cross, for there is no grander, no more complete, no more exhaustive display of the love of God anywhere than in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Soli Deo Gloria.
