"It is a great sadness when sufferers seek relief by sparing God his sovereignty over pain. The sadness is that this undercuts the very hope it aims to create…pain and loss are bitter providences. Who has lived long in this world of woe without weeping, sometimes until the head throbs and there are no more tears…? But oh the folly of trying to lighten the ship of suffering by throwing God’s governance overboard. The very thing the tilting ship needs in the storm is the ballast of God’s good sovereignty, not the unburdening of deep and precious truth. What makes the crush of calamity sufferable is not that God shares our shock, but that His bitter providences are laden with the bounty of love." ~ John Piper (Click to visit his multi-resource website)
"I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us." - Romans 8:18 Holy Bible, NIV
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Beyond the Curse
So this was death. The end of music.
In the throat, no fragrant throb of breath or offering.
No limbs conducting outreach toward the hand of love.
She’d lived with signs: the wilted garden; in the brow of Cain an unrelenting furrow.
This. A fall descending to descendants and the verdict dust.
How hard to eye the fruit of her conviction: murder her defiance had enabled…
Yet, two generations into you will surely die, God’s mark of steadfast clemency.
Thus even Eve, who mothered mortal life, could taste in burial the still-sweet yield of undertaking. ________________________
Redemption
The angels offered mercy, an escape for Lot’s entire household counting almost-sons who having witnessed a divine defense of honor dared to scoff at certain doom.
Commanded to depart, Lot paused… needed to be tugged away from the destructive self caught up in doubts and compromise the hand of grace dislodged for him; for us.
What did Lot’s wife hope to see when on that moving day her eyes slid back to town, where she had raised a family, exchanged the recipes of substitution?
Perhaps she sought to douse with tears the fire of a hearth where friendship dawdled near the shame she’d entertained.
In her heart, still burning, embers of a tolerance for sin we too have hosted; in her final act, a turning hardened into destination. ________________________
Practicing Forever
“One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. He threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him…” ~ Luke 17:15-16
Some lepers race away, catch up to former life with greater loss of sense. Some dispute the source of their reprieve.
Still on record, one example of the remnant who in remedy perceived relationship: the white-flag standard of salvation. ________________________
The Life of Lazarus
With illness and concern came mourners to the grave of days and meals, aromatic memory and prospect.
After four days in the house of tears the man in deadbolt night awoke, commanded to emerge
from irreversible decay reversed to model how that Day will be a coronation of the treasured dust.