In Flint Michigan, an 8-year-old kid gets out of bed to the sound of gunshots as he was getting ready for school. He looks out his window and sees a lifeless corpse laying on the sidewalk just a few apartments away. A few weeks later this same kid tried to intervene in the middle of a heated argument between his parents only to be pushed aside by his strung-out father. Within the same month, the family comes home to an empty house because the drug-addicted father broke in and pawned whatever he could in order to get his next score.
Fast forward a few years and this kid is now in high school and makes friends with a Christian that keeps talking about this loving God, how great church is and how much he loves his life. This paradigm led to many sleepless nights as I laid awake wondering how this “good God” could allow me to grow up in the environment that I did. Why did I have to grow up in a home where my dad loved drugs more than me (direct quote)? Why did I have to see the things I saw and experience the things that I did? I often felt robbed of a childhood as I (and my siblings) was forced to be comfortable moving around or “going to grandmas for the weekend while dad calms down”. If God loved me, why didn’t my circumstances reflect it?
Each week that I went to school I was invited to church by my Christian friend Nate Murray. I’d see the joy in his eyes and the bounce in his step as he talked about his love for God. I wanted this joy! I resisted going to church with Nate for a while because there was this deep frustration inside of me about the condition of my life. Eventually, he wore me down. I started going to church with him and kept hearing about this all loving, all knowing, all powerful God and I became hopeful that my life would change if I gave myself to him. Everything would magically be better if I just gave in. So I gave in. Nothing changed. Still 15 years later now, those dynamics haven’t changed.
Frustration is often the byproduct of misplaced or improper expectations. My expectations were that God would wave his magic wand over my life and POOF, it’s all better. But why? That’s not in the scriptures at all. This way of thing has slowly seeped into the minds of people and they may “give church a shot” only to be disappointed when their life looks the same as it did before.
In Matthew 7 Jesus is telling a parable about two separate houses as a means to reflect imagery of what it means to give your life to him. The story goes:
24“Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
It took me a long time to fully understand what this meant. You see, Jesus very easily could’ve told this story and said “For the house that was built on the rock, the storms never came”, but he didn’t. Why? In both scenarios the exact same rain fell, the same floods came, the same wind blew against the house. The circumstances were identical, but the outcome was different.
The book of James tells us to “count it all joy when you face trials of many kinds”. The wording is key here. It never says IF, it says WHEN. James tells us that trials test our faith and when our faith is tested, it produces perseverance. The very thing that you’ve been trying to pray away could be the thing that God is trying to use to grow your faith. Don’t be so quick to paint the character of God using the brushes of your struggle, rather let him reveal himself to you as you gravitate to him through your storms.
So if the Bible doesn’t say Jesus will wave his magic wand at our lives and perform a disappearing act with our pain, what’s the point? The point is that in the parable of the two houses, only one house stood. The focal point of your life isn’t about what you’ve been through but rather who sustains you. Scripture consistently that Jesus is near even when he feels far. He stands in the flames with you, he’s in the boat with you in the midst of your storm, and he’s the ark that preserves you through the floods of life.
Don’t buy into this misconception on Christianity. I believe we see people fall away from their faith because they come to it with misplaced or improper expectations and that frustration pushes them away. Life isn’t a matter of “if storms” but rather “when storms“, and there’s only one foundation that endures through it all.
Chris Davis Blog 