"Moving Through"

Redeemer

by 

Mike Hamilton

It is interesting the positions we put God in when it comes to what He "should" do for us.  Like no one else in the world we ask Him to reverse suffering, loss, pain, hurts, BEFORE they occurred, to make them as if they never occurred.  If I find myself in an ER with a doctor looking at my broken leg, I do not get mad at him for not reversing the event that broke my leg.  I am not mad at the surgeon for preventing my lung cancer, I am grateful that he is gifted in lung surgery.  I do not scream at the police officer for showing up after I dialed 911, I'm grateful that he showed up quickly and is protecting me.  When I forgive another person, that forgiveness does not reverse the pain they have caused me and vice versa.  

So why do we get angry with God for not reversing our pain?  Why do we get mad that He didn't show up "before"?  We are a peculiar group of people who seem to want to dictate to God who He should be and what His role in our life should be.  God is a redeemer, He has never claimed to be a preventer.  I would say that as long as our heart and soul is bent on determining what God was supposed to do for us, we will miss what He is doing for us.  Most of us would tell an amazing tale of a fire fighter who rushed in to carry us out of a burning building, even if we had suffered many third degree burns before he got to us.  But not God, we demand that He pay for the pain He should have prevented, instead of watching Him redeem our impossible stories of loss.  

Most clients come into my office in the place of God is "preventer" not "Redeemer".  They come to me looking for a fix, a way to better communicate to their spouse, a quick way to remedy the thing they want to affect them no more.....they want to wash away from their stories the very thing God is asking them to watch Him redeem.  A failing marriage, a past of sexual abuse, a death of a child, any trauma that our hearts are screaming "I will not let this affect me, if it does I will not survive".  

I have always been told and agree with the statement "The hardest things for our hearts to handle and accept are the things we have not chosen".  Loss and suffering spiral us into a dark place of despair instead of hope when this happens to us, be it a family death, a divorce, cancer, loss of a job, a whole host of things we would never have allowed into our lives.  We despair because we put God into a role He never promised us.  We can only Hope when we correctly see Him for what it is He does, He washes the dirty, frees the slave, restores the broken, heals the wounded.  He is the redeemer.  

When your life gets to a place where things are not going well and despair is mounting, you can almost always bet that we refuse to let Him do what He does.  Redemption is out of our purview, it is not for us to participate in beyond the role of victim.  We have to watch an unpredictable and unknowable God move in our lives and hearts without the foreknowledge that a plan exists, much less a good plan.  But if we enter into this place and have Hope we have now completed the one thing He asks of us.  "Trust Me, know that I am healing what has been broken, experience Me in loss in ways you can't understand, watch Me as I take what you thought was dirty and used and violated and hopeless and turn that into something beautiful and inspiring, something that makes you Rest and makes others Hope in me too."  Stories of the heroes of 9-11 in New York pull at us because they rushed in and helped when no one else could or would.  They are heroes not because they prevented the loss but because they made us have hope in the midst of it.  God's role in our lives and hearts is no different as redeemer.  He promises us Hope in the midst of loss, He promises to Love us in ways that makes the dark light, the intolerable tolerable.