Faith or Addiction

When life is tough or unfair we all come to questions in our mind about the reason for those trials. Sometimes it seems impossible to make any sense of the events and circumstances that shock us and bring us to our knees in grief. I’m reminded of the story of Nehemiah in the Bible. We can see in the first chapter of the book of Nehemiah a man who’s wrestling and grieving with life and God. Nehemiah was a nobleman and an educated man in the nation of Israel, who now finds himself as a slave in the courts of a king whose army had killed, raped and burned his hometown to the ground. He now finds himself as the cupbearer for the king; A crash test dummy to test the drinks for poison before they get to the kings lips. Grief and humiliation of this sort is the kind that shakes a person to the core, but as we see when we read through the book, Nehemiah becomes one of the most inspiring leaders of hope as he is granted his freedom to return to his burned out city to rebuild. Nehemiah wasn’t in denial about what had happened to his home and family, his grief was very real, but it was his faith that the God of heaven had not abandoned him in his grief that allowed him to face reality again with hope. I’m sure there was the temptation to throw in the towel and allow the wounds of his heart to be drowned by some form of an addiction, rendering him useless to his future as a leader of hope and inspiration. It seems we all come to places of decision like this in our lives. We are faced with the tough questions about God:

Why didn’t you keep my parents from divorcing?

Why didn’t you stop the abuse?

Why didn’t you prevent the accident?

Pastor Eugene Peterson has said…. God will answer no such questions, no matter how often and how passionately we ask. Instead, he invites us to weep with him and receive his mercy. And he roars in anger with us and calls us to take up his sword to wage war against that which broke our heart. It is faith, in the God who has joined us and grieved with us, just a Jesus did, and that transforms our broken heart of grief and anger, to a heart that is enabled to face reality with more honesty, hope and passion. This is why the apostle Paul has said “we don’t grieve as those who have no hope”, but we have a relationship with the God who came as a man and was no stranger to our grief. With this hope we are no longer alone in our grief and our anger is transformed to passion, waging war on that which would crush hope in the lives of others. Without hope, the nearest soul numbing addiction, so often becomes our epitaph.