Hindsight & Hope April 2, 2008

This week has been one of reflection and contemplation. A time of trying to gather together a lot of the threads of the past six weeks, and of disciplining myself to get myself before God in order to hear him for the season ahead.

Forty days ago today, my life changed pretty dramatically. Without going into too much detail here, in the limitless freedom of cyberspace, I found myself walking a landscape utterly unfamiliar to me. I felt a bit like a rabbit caught in headlights, uncertain of how I should be in this new place, how I would react to it, why God had allowed it.

Looking back, with a bit of hindsight from that time. I can’t say that everything is neatly ordered and I don’t have all the answers. When I think of those days and the path I have walked since then, it all feels pretty bittersweet: I have experienced the power and presence of God in ways I had not thought possible, and yet I have encountered some of the bleakest moments of my life. At times I have marvelled as God has revealed new things to me with clarity, and yet at times I have sat straining my ears, desperate to catch a whisper from a seemingly silent heaven.

If you’d have asked me pre these 40 days, I would happily have affirmed that I believed that God uses tough things for good. I would have pulled out a couple of practised examples, and been quite smiley at the whole thing.

At this end, with a few more battle scars. I know with a certainty that I never had that this is true. It isn’t a cheery, trite certainty, but one that comes from slogging it out through some dark nights and darker mornings, finding God in what for me, have seemed like the deepest and most unpredictable places.

When I think about his faithfulness during this time. Tears come to my eyes. I can honestly say there hasn’t been a moment during these past weeks where he has abandoned me. It has come in different ways, but everytime I have called out to him, help has come.

A song I have been listening to near on loop for the past few days is called, ‘Beauty from Pain’, by Superchick. I came across it by chance during a protracted journey on the District Line, and I was immediately stunned by the words, and the pertinence to my situation of recent:
My whole world is the pain inside me
The best i can do is just get through the day
When life before is only a memory
I’ll wonder why God lets me walk through this place
And though i can’t understand why this happened
I know that i will when i look back someday
And see how you’ve brought beauty from ashes
And made me as gold purified through these flames

After all this has passed, i still will remain
After i’ve cried my last, there’ll be beauty from pain
Though it won’t be today,
Someday i’ll hope again
And there’ll be beauty from pain
You will bring beauty from my pain

Those words sum up my testimony over the last few weeks. The truth that I have found and the hope that this has given me.

Standing on the brink of what I believe God has pointed out as a new season for me, I don’t know what the landscape is going to look like. I’m sure there will still be battles ahead, but I can face all things in the sure knowledge that my Healer and Deliverer stands beside me. That I am not alone because he is God of the Breakthrough.

I love the bit in the song about gold being purified by flames. Fire isn’t comfortable, there are moments when the heat seems too much and the smoke is choking. Sometimes the smoke stings your eyes and you lose sight of your surroundings. It can feel like all you know is flame, pain, relentless temperature.

But surely the gleam of gold is worth it?

In all the discomfort of this refining, I want to come out the other end praising.