“Who told us we’d be rescued
What has changed and
Why should we be saved from nightmares
We’re asking why this happens to us
Who have died to live, it’s unfair”
This is what it means to be held
How it feels, when the sacred is torn from your life
And you survive
This is what it is to be loved and to know
That the promise was when everything fell
We’d be held” (Natalie Grant)
This song keeps appearing in my life over the last couple of years and I guess it addresses one of the greatest challenges to our faith – where is God when everything falls apart?
I recently heard of someone who had attended church for many many years and held tightly to the belief that as Christians, we are protected from life’s disasters. It made me wonder how she had managed to get through so much of her life without seeing someone of faith in pain.
A while ago, at church, there was a time of open prayer during which I felt led to pray “Thank you God that though you are so powerful you hold us in your hands.” The children were out at their activities and my then five year old daughter came back with some “words from God” she had written down while she had been in her group:
“Our God has made us all. He is powerful and He looks after us. He is inside us. He has got us in His hands. He has us in His head and in His hands.”
Truth is, this side of heaven we’ll probably not know the answers to those really hard questions about the pain that comes our way but I believe we can know we are held by big hands.
Thank you Caroline for this image in my mind of strong but tender hands encompassing us and our pain. It is so true that when we experience pain we ask the question why? I believe we all as human beings experience pain at times in our lives.
For me in my own experience of pain I ask the what? questions. What I am asking God is not why has all this happened but what is God’s purpose in this situation I am in?
What can I learn from this?
What part of this is for my protection?
What other opportunities could God be providing?
What maturity could God be building into me?
This is a way I can find a perspective beyond the situation where I feel God has allowed something in my life I don’t understand.
I love this verse from Philippians 4:8 as a direction of where to park my mind. “Finally brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable-if anything is excellent or praiseworthy-think about such things” (NIV).
God really does hold us in His hands X