A stirring comment over coffee

I had coffee with a friend yesterday, thinking I would minister to her in her troubles, and I came away greatly ministered to.

My friend’s circumstances are so fearful regarding the mysteriousness of God, that I myself was nearly shaken, though I did not let on. It is as C.S. Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed about the Divinity in the midst of his own trial, the death of his wife:

“When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him … you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double-bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. …”

Lewis made it through the period of “silence” and went on to continue to be a Christian man. But oh! Does it not seem that God takes big risks with such treatment of His frail creatures! This bafflement about God may be the “perplexity” that the Apostle Paul himself wrestled with:

“We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair” (2 Corinthians 4:8).

It is at this point that my friend ministered to me by this spontaneous statement: “God must think so highly of us.”

I knew at once what she meant. It was the opposite of what one would have expected a person in her shoes to say about God at that moment, and yet I understood. It is precisely because God thinks we are able to survive His most arduous testings that He makes no apologies for them. He puts us through boot-camp training for the perfecting of our character, like sons and daughters who should understand that it is part of the program:

“… God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline” (Hebrews 12:7).

His whole goal is to present us highly perfected by the time we reach heaven, not by a blink-of-an-eye transformation from sow’s ear to silk purse on the Day of Judgment. Much of the spade work is to be done here, and much of it by the apparent aloofness of God:

“… to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard …” (Colossians 1:22-23).

I was so used to thinking of myself as pond scum, and being told as much in theological terms, that I had almost forgotten a very important fact:

“I can do all things through Him who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13).

The coffee hour over, I got in my car and drove away, better prepared to face my own day for knowledge of God’s high opinion of me in Christ.