Is Life a Bed of Roses?

Wednesday 2/8/2012 4:52 AM

Yesterday I read a short article where the author attributed all the little inconveniences that happened to him throughout the day to God’s intervention, in order to protect him.  He had a dead battery in his car.  The reason for that was to keep him from getting hit by a drunk driver.  When he ordered his sandwich at lunch the order was wrong so the restaurant had to make another sandwich.  This was because the first order was made by someone who was sick and God wanted to protect his health.  And so it went, with all the bad things explained away because a loving God was protecting him throughout the day.

I have no doubt that God could engineer the circumstances of my day so that everything would work out for my good like that but I don’t think that is the way God works, in spite of words in Romans 8:28.  Many of the inconveniences of my life are of my own making and, in my opinion, have little to do with God’s intervention.  My battery goes dead on my car because I fail to perform routine maintenance to check it regularly.  I sleep through my alarm because I did not go to bed on time, so as to be fully rested, and so on.

The Bible says that I have been made in the image of God, that he is shaping me into the image of Christ and that God wants me to live life to the full.  When I look at the nature of God and at the life of Christ, both are acquainted with suffering and grief.  If I am to have the heart of Christ fully alive within me I will experience all that life has to offer, including suffering.  Paul expressed the same sentiment in Philippians 3:10, “I want to know Christ – yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.”  As the Spirit molds me so that I reflect the image of Christ, I will experience more and more suffering as I see the world through the eyes of Jesus.  Injustice will increasingly bother me until eventually I take a stand against it.  Seeing the broken lives of people around me will drive me to reach out to them in love, like Christ, who had compassion for the hurting and the lonely.

Some in the Christian community preach a health and wealth gospel; if I give my life to God everything will be wonderful and will work for my good.  In reality, I believe that when I give my life to God he will break my heart with what breaks his and he will move me to action so that I can be his arms of love wrapped around a broken, needy world.