Saturday, May 9, 2015

Enduring the Worst Day of the Year


COMING around as if it were Groundhog Day is the day of calamity past!
For some it’s Mother’s Day or Father’s day. For others, it’s the anniversary date of a loved one’s death — where we still reel with lonely aberrant longing. For others, again, it’s a date in history that is wished was never part of history.
If there is one date that marks the worst of my life it’s October 4, 2003. (And yet, over a decade on I have only a story of God’s faithfulness to tell. I see that I’m fortunate.)
Every year the same dates and events and milestones come. And they may frustrate us continually, or we deny their power, or we wrestle with them. Some months or seasons can be loathsome, just as some are joyously anticipated.
***
How can it be that life has struck us such a cruel blow?
It’s an event of sufficient magnitude to send rushes of sound waves into the future so as to rock impending events. And seemingly we are without control. Not only have we been blindsided in the historic genesis of this pain, we may be backwashed into the corner of a present dilemma of soul. It’s not just one cruel blow; it’s a series.
If we are to settle present events, so as to invest in the down-payment of future poise, we need to revisit those events of past. But we don’t valiantly go there without being vouchsafed with the Presence of God.
Healing Presence, is this about.
Going back there with intention — the intention to be back there safely, and to feel secure in planetary hell — is anticipated and, therefore, some planning and preparation has gone in.
Understanding that God heals us by his Presence — a phenomenon transcending time — because God comes from eternity — we go back there with the full assurance that God is with us; yes, even back in that historical traumatising moment.
It is not the point that God didn’t stop it. God will not work that way. But the Lord was as broken for us as we were. Imagine a perfectly holy God in the midst — as a witness — of such evil! Imagine how God feels about us in our absolute vulnerability, subjected to the tyrannical mess that was, in those horrendous moments, about to sweep over us, to wreak such destruction.
***
In the pain, God is with us by his Presence, back in that very moment.
He who has promised in the Ancient of Days to never leave us nor forsake us is eternally with us, and no less in our darkest moments.
© 2015 Steve Wickham.

No comments:

Post a Comment