An eyelash is overlooked, until the moment one lands in our eye. The rubbing on our eyeball is highly irritating! Our concentration, our focus is broken until we can get that eyelash out.
One tiny hair doesn’t affect too many lives. Our neighbors don’t know of and don’t share in this irritation.
This is how misery can affect us, too. Often, we’re the ones who are hindered. Depending on the nature and severity of our current misery, our families may also feel repercussions. Due to this enormous distraction, we quit focusing. We pause on serving God and pause in our worship.
God’s enemy does not fight fair. God wants us, wants our hearts and has literally moved heaven and earth to prove it. Meanwhile, His enemy doesn’t care, at least not about us. The enemy is working to keep us disconnected from God. He preys on us, to find our weaknesses and magnifies them to keep us crippled and our eyesight hazy when we look to God.
Joseph sums it up well: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people.” Gen 50:20, NLT.
But God!
Once we’re past the initial emotions that first occur in a state of misery, we have a choice to make. Are we going to marinate in what ails us, letting it permeate deep within? Or are we going to hand it over to God?
Giving it to God means trusting Him to do something. God is The Master Creator. He is very well experienced in making beauty appear. It is not unfathomable to believe that He can also take our hardest, most painful moments and transform them into something breathtakingly beautiful.
Trusting God with our misery does not mean that it is automatically canceled. The pain may not go away. The healing may not come as we expect. The relationship might never be restored. Our career situation may not change overnight. The circumstances may not change immediately.
What does change is our hearts. Rather than just focusing on what’s happening to us, let’s keep our hearts and eyes open to how God is working through us. When God is in it, our situation is no longer beyond the point of reasoning. All is not hopeless, all is not lost. God can use our experience to share hope, particularly with those in similar situations. God will use us to meet needs, to comfort and to love as He loves.
God can use our story, our misery, for ministry.
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Written by Sabrina Jacques-Rowe
Communications Director,
Henderson Highway Church
