waiting

I have found it amazingly refreshing to sit in a place of pure honesty before God and others when life is cloudy, hard and I just can't make sense of anything happening to me. I have a desperate need to understand it all, and to explain it all to others, but why? So I can justify myself and functionally wipe out all that God has done to justify me once and for all, through Christ? Yes, pretty much. Well, there is grace for that too. And does God simply want to make us "blind from birth" (or insert your particular suffering) so that he will be seen as big "so that the works of God might be displayed in us", and we will just be miserable, pathetic creatures? No. Our faith gradually becomes more mature through sufferings, we know Christ more deeply as we share in his sufferings, we love others more genuinely when we have suffered, we have conversations that are honest and real with our friends and family members, we recognize and long more truly for the world to work properly again when Christ returns to right all that is wrong, and to bring us back to perfect harmony with himself, each other and with our world. Now, that might be a stretch to think through completely on the average morning, but it is a redemptive view of suffering that with God's help, we can grow to see glimpses of. I am just beginning to see these glimpses in my life. Ask the people around you. Often they can see them before you can.