Trusting in Spite of Questions

 

Recently one of my students asked me my favorite Christmas song. It may have been just a ploy to avoid real work for a few minutes, but I took time to answer. There are two that I love. The first is “O, Little Town of Bethlehem,” and the second is “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear.” I have memories of singing both of these carols as a child in the hills of West Virginia. The mystery and quiet of Christmas surrounds these sweet songs with visions of a starry sky and shepherds on the hillside.  

I especially like the third of verse of “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear”:

And ye, beneath life's crushing load,
whose forms are bending low,
who toil along the climbing way
with painful steps and slow,
look now! for glad and golden hours
come swiftly on the wing.
O rest beside the weary road,
and hear the angels sing!

I have a really good life—people who love me, a fulfilling job, a secure home—and yet there are moments with life does seem “crushing.” My extended family has endured seven deaths in this past year. Some of these were people who had lived long and busy lives, but some were relatively young, and their loss is keenly felt. I have to admit that I have struggled with resentment. Why does God instruct us to pray if he already knows what he will do? Why get my hopes up with promises of “two or three gathered together”? Why the nebulous language about praying in Jesus’ name? More than once in recent months, I have thought, What am I missing? What are we all missing?

I don’t have a firm answer to my question, but in my Bible reading, I have realized that even Jesus didn’t get everything he asked for on this earth. When he prayed in the garden before his arrest, Jesus asked if the “bitter cup” might pass without his having to drink it. No.

Neither did the apostle Paul get all his prayers answered in the affirmative. He requested that God remove his “thorn in the flesh,” but God just told him to keep trusting. (See II Corinthians 12.)

I don’t know what you’re struggling to understand this season, but it’s likely there’s something. We have only to look around us to see people and situations in need of God’s help: illness, fear, unbelief—the list goes on. And we are still called to trust.

So trust is what I will do, by God’s grace. The message of Christmas is still the message of hope. It’s the assurance that God has not left us to our own devices to figure out how to fix ourselves. It’s because we cannot fix ourselves that Jesus came to live the sorrowful life that we each must face. Then he conquered death. Even though human life predictably ends, death is not really the end. “The hopes and fears of all the years” met in Bethlehem many years ago, and Jesus was the answer.  He is still the answer, and he enters in when we invite him. Jesus does not eliminate every struggle of life, but his presence certainly gives comfort and a promise of better things to come.

--Sherry Poff