Bridging the Gap

Allow me to explain how the book you hold in your hands emerged. Years ago, I was prayerfully preparing a teaching. As usual, God did not tell me what to say. He simply inclined my heart in the direction of what I needed to study. That inclination led me to restudy passages from the Bible that describe the temptation of Jesus.

Previously, I had viewed Jesus’ temptation as a real trial in his present and a foreshadowing of the trials he would face in his future as he walked toward the cross. Turning to the passages this time, I found myself remembering a decade-old conversation with one of my first mentors, whom I will call Marie.

Marie was a very private person, but when she opened the door to her personal life you needed to take notes. I always called her with a journal open and a pen poised. This woman was profound. And like most truly profound people, she was intimately familiar with pain. One day, Marie told me about a friend who visited her in the hospital after her third miscarriage. Trying to console her, the well-meaning friend had said, “You know, Marie, God is going to make you even stronger through this.”

My mentor smiled, thanked her friend, and thought about her words for several days. Relaying the hospital conversation to me, Marie explained that though she appreciated her friend’s intention, she questioned her friend’s conclusion about the purpose of pain. Marie ended our time together that day with this thought: “I feel that trials do not prepare us for what’s to come as much as they reveal what we’ve done with our lives up to this point.”

As Marie considered the pain of her third miscarriage, she realized that her response to this trial was less of a window into her future than it was a window into her past. Her current choices reflected and revealed her past choices. How had she responded previously when her dearest dreams perished in her womb? Did she withdraw from God in bitterness or come near to him with her unanswered questions? Had she tried to outrun the pain, or had she given herself permission to grieve and let the tears wash her wounds? The choices of her yesterdays were revealed through the window of her responses to her current trial.

In other words, trials tell us less about our future than they do about our past. Why? Because the decisions we make in difficult places today are greatly the product of decisions we made in the unseen places of our yesterdays.

From anonymous: Jesus' hidden years... and yours
© Alicia Britt Chole

For more from Alicia Britt Chole, please visit the resource room at truthportraits.com.

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