This may be one of the hardest scriptures in the Bible to accept:
Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy (James 1:2 – NLT).
My response is precisely the opposite.
When troubles come my way, I consider it an opportunity for great frustration. Great sadness. Great scheming. Or a great escape.
It’s that last approach that settles in most often for me. My fallen human perspective is that the best thing to do when faced with suffering is to find somewhere to hide from it. So I run: literally lacing up my shoes, or to a good movie or book, or to a sugar binge, or to a splurge on some material thing, or to my work (my most common escape of choice).
The problem is that when you and I run to anything or anyone other than Christ, we’re just prolonging our pain rather than enjoying it.
That’s right, enjoying it.
How in the world can we enjoy pain? It seems thoroughly counterintuitive. Yet that’s exactly what the scriptures admonish us to do: consider our troubles an opportunity for great joy.
Here’s why: For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing (3,4).
The purpose behind our pain from our vantage point is to slow us down, hold us up, frustrate our future, and steal our joy. The purpose behind our pain from God’s vantage point is to speed us up, release our potential, expand our horizon, and fulfill our joy.
And here’s the key to adopting that second lens as our own: If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you... But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone (5,6).
It’s not that we’re supposed to avoid seeking comfort when we’re hurt, angry, or discouraged. It’s not our tendency to run that’s the problem. There’s nothing wrong with the great escape.
It’s where we run when we’re suffering that makes all the difference – and more accurately, to whom. The secret behind enjoyed pain is the discipline of concentrating entirely upon a singular source of solace: God alone.
That job is going to end someday. The movie will be over in 113 minutes. That shopping spree will fade from memory and leave you just as unsettled as before, only poorer.
You can work out, eat up, and slave away all you want, desperately trying to enjoy something else other than your pain.
But when you finally escape to God alone, you’ll find that whatever you’re suffering isn’t an annoyance, a setback, or a disappointment.
It’s an opportunity. Enjoy it.
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Posted by: Onitsuka Tiger | June 03, 2011 at 04:50 AM