Wednesday, June 12, 2013

When Victory Doesn't Look Like What We Thought It Would

It is with a sad, humbled and quite honestly confused heart that I write these words.  Today I am dealing with grief and today victory does not look as I feel it should or the way I thought it would.  Who am I to even define victory in the first place, no one really, and I realize that.  I am not the Creator of the universe nor am I the one who holds it all together.  What I am however, is one who looks at life completely differently than the actual Designer of it.  I am limited and my limitations are sometimes incredibly painful.  

I will never wrap my mind around some of the things God does or allows and quite frankly it is hard to learn how to be okay with that.  Today a precious woman in my life was taken and an even more precious woman to me is grieving as her mother is no longer by her side.  A diagnosis was made far away in Kenya, funds were raised in a miraculous way within 2 days amounting to $15,000 and it was all for a woman who lives her life in full surrender to the Lord...daily.  She saves young girls and their babies, she rescues the hopeless from poverty and she shares Jesus with anyone in her presence.  She has already lost her sister, her young nephew and her uncle. She is a mighty warrior for our God.  Surely she deserves His mercy upon her mother.  Right? And so my limitations begin.

My limited vision tempts me to see only from a human perspective. It allows me to believe that her healing would be the victory.  Healing is what we all prayed for and for some reason because of the circumstances listed above I believed it would happen with my whole heart. Therefore the blow of what happened is even more harsh.  The reality is that healing is not where victory is to be found.  Victory is to be found in the truth that Jesus came, He lived, He died, He rose again and out of His great mercy and love coupled with our surrender and acceptance of this great gift we NEVER have to die.  The grave has been conquered! This precious mom is not dead as we think, she is for the first time FULLY alive!   

I can hear the Amen chorus as I typed those words and rightfully so.  But isn't the truth that in our humanness we still want the physical healing?  The joy to be found in Christ conquering the grave is hard to grasp.  Honestly, I think we want something more tangible than that, at least I know I do.  I believed throughout this time that the great testimony would be in her healing and God's name would be lifted high.  He would show Himself to so many people in this way.  What I didn't see coming was that the testimony was not going to be in the healing as I thought but rather it was going to be in the unshakable faith of this tiny, grief filled beautiful Kenyan as she praises the God who just took her mother.



So today as I grapple with this grief and this concoction of complete healing and restoration mixed with devastating loss, I am keenly aware that I do not know God like I should.  I love Him, I follow Him and yet I still do not know Him as I should.  What I have realized is that I do not want my prayers to be limited with things that God can do for me and I do not want to treat God as if He is a magic genie in a bottle who should succumb to my wishes.  What I want is majority of my prayer time to be spent in fellowship with Him growing my relationship, learning more of who He is, listening to His voice and seeking His will. I want to be like Paul and give thanks for ALL things.  I want more of God's perspective, I want to embrace His definition of victory and quite simply, I just want more of Him.