A friend from Nicaragua wrote today and shared this local saying: God writes straight on crooked lines. Our friend writes: The significance of this simple phrase lies in two things: first that God makes straight our crooked paths, and second, that even though life has its challenges and corners, God sees the situatiion in a different way that isn't confusing but rather makes perfect sense.

I spoke with another friend today who is in the most difficult of personal times. It also seems that many of those closest to him are all going through very difficult times: cancer, the loss of a teenage son, an emotional breakdown, alcoholism, conviction of white collar crime, bankruptcy and the list goes on. Many of these people are "good people," people who love God, who are serving God and others.

I had some "Job's comforters," in my life in the past few years. Job was the Old Testament figure who suffered so greatly. His friends gathered around him, got tired of grieving with him over his huge losses and then began to rebuke him, make trite statements that reflected wrong assumptions about suffering and life. In my last months at Calvary, someone said to me, "Twelve months from now you will be at such a better place, it will be great, you will be glad to be out from under the pressures" He did not have the gift of prophecy. It was a grossly insensitive and based on false assumptions. Perhaps it made him feel better. But the truth is life has gotten harder since that point.

My recent serious illness has pushed me into one of those deep valley times of life. It is deeply confusing as to God's purposes. There are no guarantees that the future will be as good or better than the past. That is not pessimism, that is realism. Hebrews 11 cites all kinds of God lovers, people passionately committed to loving and serving God, whose earthly lives were hellish. In verses 39-40 of Hebrews 11, the writer says, "They were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised. God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect."

If someone had said to any of them, cheer up, life is going to be better a year from now, that person would have been dead wrong. These people are commended not because their lives got better, not because their lives are going well but rather because they maintained faith even though their earthly existence was profoundly difficult. There is the promise that someday they will receive their just reward but in those anguishing days of human existence, there was a grind it a day at a time faith--and some of those days seemed downright impossible.

Hebrews 12 then issues the challenge to all of us: "Therefore since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart."

I've written on this passage before. The image is not a stadium filled with people witnessing our lives but rather it is a stadium filled with people shouting, "Keep on, take one more step, we can testify as to God's faithfulness to us in the most horrible, most confusing, debilitating times of life. Persevere Look at Jesus. Don't grow weary and lose heart."

The encouragement is not, "Keep going life is going to get better." It may not. The promise is that somehow, in someway, we will experience the grace needed for this day. Even when our hearts are breaking; emotionally we feel right on the fringe of going over the edge; when we are deeply confused; and when we languish in situautions that seem unfair or insignificant, the encouragement is not to grow weary and lose heart.

I am not sure how that works. Later in Hebrews 12 the writer says that one of the key ministries of the body of Christ is bearing up our brothers and sisters who are going through deeply difficult times in their lives.He also says that our hard times produces a "harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it." 

God writes straight on crooked paths.