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Then Jesus entered a house, and again
a crowd gathered, so that He and His disciples were not even able to
eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of
Him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.” And the teachers of the
law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He is possessed by
Beelzebub! By the prince of demons He is driving out demons.”
Mark 3:20-22 |
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In The Lion, The Witch and the
Wardrobe, Lucy, the youngest but most spiritually sensitive of
the Pevensey children, suffers intensely when her brothers and
sister refuse to believe what she has to tell them about the land of
Narnia. Much the same thing happens in Prince Caspian, when she
alone senses Aslan warning her that they are heading in the wrong
direction. There is a cost to pay for seeing as the Lord sees, and
grief at discerning His calling when others either cannot or will
not follow where He is leading.
There is nothing new about this.
There came a time when even Jesus’s own family lost confidence in
what He was doing – but our Lord refused to be disheartened by their
lack of affirmation. If we too encounter hostility from those
closest to us, we cannot afford to allow this opposition to put us
off. Turning back would cause God and others grief, and jeopardize
the work that He has given us to do – but we need courage to keep
moving forward!
At the same time, there is no shame
in acknowledging the pain we feel. When I began work on my first
book, certain friends and reputable leaders tried hard to induce me
to restrict myself to the teaching, and to edit out all trace of my
own testimony. I felt strongly that real life stories would break up
the blocks of teaching and provide access points to the truths I was
seeking to convey. Because I was uncertain of my literary voice in
those days, I compromised then more than I would today.
More recently, when the Lord called
us to move to Shetland, He warned us that we would have to set our
faces like flint to resist inevitable pressures not to move so far
away. Having witnessed that there are no emptier people on earth
than those who turn their back on a genuine call of God, we were
determined not to allow anyone else’s agenda to distract us from
what the Lord was asking us to do. At the same time, we had our own
grief to process at the prospect of leaving friends and family.
If you have come through a period of
intense grief and sense that the time has come to embrace some new
role or relationship, it can be immensely distressing when people
oppose this. “You’re way ahead of yourself,” their attitudes if not
their actual words imply. “Why, you’re acting as if such and such
had never even existed!”
There is a poignant reminder here to
think before we speak! It is hard for us as outsiders to gauge where
someone else is up to on their grief journey, and all too easy to
make insensitive comments that reopen people’s wounds at the very
time when they are beginning to emerge into some new phase in their
life. Why should we expect them to go on mourning if they have
genuinely moved on beyond it? |
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Reflect and Pray
I am mocked and scorned for Your sake;
Humiliation is written all over my face.
Passion for Your house burns within me,
so that those who insult You are also insulting me.
Psalm 69:7,9Whether the
opposition that we face comes primarily from people we are closely
associated with – partners, parents, children, employers, co-workers
and the suchlike – or because we have made things harder for
ourselves by handling situations badly, the Lord can still bring us
through.
When we find ourselves under intense
pressure it is good to remind ourselves of how the Lord helped
David. Shortly before Saul was slain, and he was summoned to become
the new King of Judah, David experienced one of his most grievous
trials. Providentially denied the opportunity to wage war against
his own flesh and kin, David and his men returned home in time to
find their village in flames, and their wives and families
missing.18 As if that was not shocking enough, his own men then
turned on him, threatening to stone him. Just how bad could things
get? As Matthew Henry reminds us,
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When David
was at his wit’s end, he was not at his faith’s end. The
Lord can, and will, bring light out of darkness, peace out
of trouble and good out of evil. |
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Serif photo dvd |
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Instead of giving in to despair, David
found strength in the Lord (1 Samuel 30:6).19 I love that
expression. It speaks of immense resilience in the face of
overwhelming loss. It would have been so easy to allow fear and
tension to overwhelm him, but David plunged deep into the Lord’s
presence and gained precious reassurance: “Pursue them – you will
overtake them and succeed in rescuing them” (1 Samuel 30:8). |
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Handling Dark Times: Tunnel
Experiences
We think you ought to know, dear brothers and sisters, about the
trouble we went through in the province of Asia. We were crushed and
overwhelmed beyond our ability to endure, and we thought we would
never live through it. In fact, we expected to die. But as a result,
we stopped relying on ourselves and learned to rely only on God, who
raises the dead. And He did rescue us from mortal danger, and He
will rescue us again. We have placed our confidence in Him, and He
will continue to rescue us. And you are helping us by praying for
us. Then many people will give thanks because God has graciously
answered so many prayers for our safety. 2 Corinthians 1:8-11
A few weeks before Rosalind’s spasms began, a friend from church had
a picture that we were about to enter a dark tunnel. Although she
could see a bright light at the far end of it, she sensed that we
were not going to reach that light immediately.
Read More .
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References
18 1 Samuel 30:1f
19 The word chazaq (strength) occurs three hundred times in
Scripture. |
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