One of the themes of my preaching in years past was the need for God to remove one by one from each of us the grounds on which we stood until we had nothing upon which to stand but the grace of God. Paul seemed to me to be the perfect example. In Philippians he listed the various grounds upon which he placed his confidence until the Damascus Road experience. In a blind stupor he found himself helpless before God, the perfect place for the discovery of grace. When preaching those thoughts I did not realize the depth of my own need. A recent reading of a book by Larry Crabb, Shattered Dreams, has reminded me of the truthfulness of those sermons and stirred in me a hope and reminder that my losses (many self-inflicted) are the means to great gain with God. The difficulty lies in allowing the pain and struggle of loss to bring us to God, rather than numbing the pain through various fixes which seem to give temporary relief. Crabb reminds us in his book that until we are willing to endure pain and suffering without the fixes we can never experience the presence of God. The pain and suffering of life and its shattered dreams may never fully abate, but the presence of God can become more powerful in us in the midst of these losses if we abandon ourselves to God rather than continually finding ways and means to alleviate the suffering. This seems to be the challenge: to endure until we find the reality of God.

It all reminds me of a story one of my seminary professors once told of a British pastor and writer named F. B. Meyer. A young minister came to see Meyer one day complaining of an unsupportive wife whom he planned to divorce so that he could continue in his plans for ministry. After listening as long as he could, Meyer suddenly stood up, pounded his desk, and said: "Young man, my sorrow has been my strength." What the young man had not known was that Meyer's wife had left him years ago because of her aversion to his ministry but that he had never divorced her, choosing rather to live with the constant pain of separation.

The message seems to be that the only path to a true relationship to God is through the sufferings of life, rather than around them. Much of my life, as I look back, has been composed of creative (and sinful) attempts to avoid pain. Pray that I may finally learn to embrace the pain in order to find the embrace of God.