Greetings from snowy Toronto! After a warm and foggy day earlier this week, it seems winter has come back with a vengeance. I actually love winter, but am taking advantage of the colder weather to cozy up inside writing and drinking tea. Stay tuned tomorrow for a BIG announcement... but first here is part II of my waiting series:
I've recently been reading a book by
Randy Alcorn called If God Is Good. Faith in the Midst of
Suffering and Evil. It is quite interesting reading and I may
post more on it in the future. One of the things that came to mind
as I began to read it was the connection between suffering and
waiting, and how that fits into my particular life story.
Towards the start of the book, Alcorn
makes the distinction between evil and suffering. I
won't go into this in too much detail, but it's a critical
distinction. He refers to suffering as a secondary evil, the result
of sin. This means that while suffering occurs because there is evil
in the world, suffering in any given case is not necessarily the
direct result of a specific sin. An example would be in John 9, when
Jesus's disciples asked whether a man's blindness was the result of
his parents' sin or his own sin, but Jesus contracted them, saying
“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but
this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”
(John 9:3)
Thinking about suffering as the result
of sin and evil in our world makes one wonder what life would be like
without the fall. Obviously, that's impossible to really
conceptualize because our world has been built by generations upon
generations of fallen people, but it's still an interesting thought.
I started thinking more specifically about waiting and suffering.
Now, as I mentioned in my last post, I'm a pretty impatient person
sometimes, but I think that in this part of the world, it's common to
consider waiting akin to suffering. We complain when the line is too
long at Starbucks, or when our bus comes two minutes late, forgetting
that the convenience of a fairly reliable transport system and a
disposable income is something that many people in this world do not
have. So it would seem that in some cases, when we perceive waiting
as suffering, it is the result of our own sinful, self-centred
attitudes. Alcorn touches on this when he says on page 60: “If we
accept the argument that the highest value of the universe is
short-term human happiness in the form of immediate fulfullment of
desires, then we cannot defend the Christian worldview, because we
ourselves have departed from it.” (Italics his.)
On the other hand, sometimes the wait
can be agonizing. There are people who are waiting for organ
transplants to become available, or for rain to come in a time of
drought. That someone would suffer in these occasions, not knowing
if or when a respite will come, is the result of evil in the world
that causes our bodies and the earth itself to be under the curse.
This makes me wonder: In an perfect,
sinless world, would we never have to wait for anything? To a North
American mindset, that seems to make sense. To a biblical worldview,
not so much. The Bible talks about waiting on God and about their
being a time for everything. Even if I were sinless, I still would
not be omniscient, so I could still desire something that is long in
coming. This specifically plays into my story because – from my
human point of view – I waited a long time for Gil. I was single
for many loooooong years. I watched a lot of friends pair up, get
married, and have babies, and there were times when I thought my own
wedding day would never come. There were certainly times when my
suffering was self-imposed and sinful, brought on by jealousy and
feeling sorry for myself, but there were other times throughout this
period when I genuinely suffered from loneliness and confusion about
my own purpose and path. Nevertheless, I can't help but think that
even in a perfect world, we still would not get everything at the
exact moment we wanted it. After all, God is so much more than a
wish-granting Genie. No, I believe that in that perfect world, I
would trust God enough to know that when things didn't go according
to what I anticipated, He was going to do something better.
In the end, that is where the “rubber
hits the road”, so to speak. If I have to live in this world, how
can I do my best not to sin when I am in the waiting period? While I
did meet my husband in the end, I'm certain there will be many more
waits in the future. The biblical answer would seem to be to
continue trusting in God, and, as David said, “Wait for the LORD;
be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD”. (Ps. 27:14) Easy to say; not so easy to do sometimes...
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