Friday, January 22, 2016

Everything

I recently heard a quote that I loved.  It goes like this, How I view God is how I view everything.

Actually, now I'm plagued with doubt about the exact wording.  Maybe it went more like, What I believe about God is what I believe about everything.

Either way.

I've tried to explain to multiple people why this quote is such a great one, with varying measures of success.  It's a little more abstract than your run-of-the-mill statement.  But all that aside, here's why I like it.

Because if God is Just, and Perfect, and Good, and Unchanging, and He is Constant (I started capitalizing all the words and now I just can't stop), then I am able to understand that literally nothing else in this entire world will ever measure up to God.  Nothing.

A friend recently was talking about how life wasn't fair.  She's been praying for the salvation of several close family members, praying that their lives would get straightened up, that healing would come, but nothing was happening.  Don't all things work together for good to them that love God?  She loved God.

That's tough.  A lot of what was going on in her life at the time was unfair.  There isn't another way to say it except to admit that she'd been dealt a raw deal, and things were not looking good.  And you know what?  That's okay to say that things were unfair, things were unjust, things weren't looking good.

It's okay because God is good inspite of the injustices of this life.  It's okay because God is faithful in spite of the failures of literally every single one of us.  It's okay because there has never been a promise made to any single one of us that life would be fair.  It won't be fair because it can't be.  Because when I understand that God Himself is the only perfect and true constant, I can stop expecting that life will be perfect.  Life can't be.  Life is messy and hard, but in all of that, there's God.  And when I view the Lord Himself as the only answer, then I can rely on Him each and every time that life lets me down.

And that's why what I believe about God is what I believe about everything.  Because my view of God's of God's infallibility/immutability/etc. means that nothing else will measure up.  And that's actually a really, really, really reassuring fact.

2 comments:

Firefly said...

Ohmygoodness, yes. It's a hard concept to explain to people when you actually believe that AND are going through a legitimately stupidly hard/unfair time and are really really hurting from that. But yeah, so so true. True that you can believe that AND still be hurting.

Little Jo Sleep said...

Yes! I was thinking about you when I was writing this. Because life isn't fair--you know that better than anyone--but in it we can know with assurance that God is still God, and He hasn't let you down, even if life has.