Calamities and distresses come to all of us. At times we get ourselves into all sorts of trouble while other times completely out of our control calamities arise and distresses of all types follow. I don’t think there is a person who will walk the planet who will not at some stage in their life not encounter a calamity and be in distress over it.
The phrase “calamities and distresses” is not my own. This morning I read 1 Samuel 10:19, where Samuel rebukes the children of Israel who insisted on rejecting God despite His constant love towards them.
“But you have now rejected your God, who saves you out of all your calamities and distresses.”
God did it first – He saved His people out of their calamities and distresses. It does not mean the messy, painful situations didn’t arise.
It does mean that when they come, God is there. He is a Constant. He sees it all and saves us out of all our calamities and distresses. This doesn’t mean things don’t change. It doesn’t mean the disasters don’t cause some terrible upsets. They do. At the time, they may look catastrophic with no way out. But as you cling to God and as you see the days become weeks and months pass and you find the situation resolve itself, you become more confident in the hand of God as He saves you out of your calamity and distress.
Even if there seems to be no conclusion, when you cling to God, there is an unexpected supernatural peace that defies understanding.
Sometimes, it may be, that the saving out of calamities and distress is only evident after death.
We may not feel, this side of eternity that God has saved us out of our dreadful trials. But when we die, it will all become very clear.
All we can do is to surrender our lives to God and trust Him through thick and thin.
I don’t know how else to do it.
For those who have gone through a calamity of major proportions and who have clung to God and surrendered their lives to Him on a daily basis – just for the day – when they look back, they see God has saved them from a great deal of distress.
Philip Yancey puts it like this:
“Faith means believing in advance what only makes sense in reverse.”
Philip Yancey also says this:
“What I see is that God welcomes our experience of unfairness and injustice and anger against the way the world is run.
“He is aggrieved the world is not being run in a way which would please him. He is asking us to pray ‘on earth as it is in heaven’ – something which is not happening – and then he asks us to be part of bringing hope and justice to a badly spoiled planet.
“I have to trust that … God is powerful enough to do what he has promised.
“We don’t know what that’s going to look like and we don’t know how those rifts of creation will be healed. But we do have some hints. Jesus’s miracles alongside his death and resurrection act as strong indicators of what God promises for the whole world.
“I wouldn’t want to live in a world without that faith.”
I can’t get my head around the suffering in the world, but I can have simple faith as a child and trust God each and every day.
These are the days.
Keep the smile going.
In His Grip,
Helga xx 🙂