photo courtesy of Shauna Maness Photography
The truth is, no matter the condition of our faith, we all have bad days. And when I’m having a bad day — you know, like barfing for twenty-some hours straight as a result of a toxin that’s flowing through my veins and killing off every cell in hopes of catching the one or two bad ones that could kill me — on those days, I don’t need someone to come along and tell me that it’s all going to be okay.
My experience with cancer is not the first time I’ve encountered this phenomenon.
When I watched my mom spiral into depression after my parents’ divorce, she would say, “It’s going to be okay.”
When I was with my dad every other weekend as a child and watched him take drink after drink, he would say, “It’s going to be okay.”
The day I ended up in the hospital after sticking my finger down my throat one too many times and had literally burned holes in my esophagus and weighed a good eighty-five pounds soaking wet, a nurse told me, “It’s going to be okay.”
After my miscarriage when I was twelve weeks pregnant, my friends told me, “It’s going to be okay.”
As I stood in front of my mother’s corpse at the funeral home, amid sobbing people and a slew of flowers, people came through the line and said, “It’s going to be okay.”
And then, when I shared the news of my cancer diagnosis, I received e-mails and shoulder pats with those dreaded words once again; “It’s going to be okay.”
There have been countless times when I want to stand up and shout, “NO! IT IS NOT GOING TO BE OKAY!”
We live in a broken, messed-up world, and there are some things that are never going to be okay.
Embracing raw faith means understanding that the Christian life also means accepting pain, suffering, and trials. Genuine faith means accepting the reality that life is a continual movement to become more like Jesus.
Manmade religion wants to lull us into a place of rules and being just okay, but Jesus rocks our world and calls us to live deeply, whether in times of joy or struggle. In other words, it’s okay to not be okay.
Better than Okay
God doesn’t guarantee us deliverance from hardship, and following him doesn’t mean we’ll never go through the fire. But he does promise us something better: He doesn’t waste anything we go through. And no matter what happens, He will go through it with us.
God’s grace runs deeper than any heartbreak we will experience in this life. His love goes beyond any unanswered questions we might have. And God’s purpose and plan for our future can trump any sin, any obstacle, and any defeat we might experience. He can use the very things that plague us — our most difficult trials — to chisel us into the character of his Son. That’s something we can’t experience if we settle for okay.
EXCERPT FROM RAW FAITH: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN GOD PICKS A FIGHT BY BEST-SELLING AUTHOR, KASEY VAN NORMAN. RAW-FAITH.COM. COPYRIGHT KASEY VAN NORMAN MINISTRIES 2014.
article by Kasey Van Norman
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