Discovering God’s Will:  God Uses Our Problems

        Rev. William “Buck” Day

Is it God’s desire that we suffer, that we have pain in our lives?  The reality is that we do live in this world; and so, living in this world, we are not immune from the troubles that come to us.  So the question really is not, is it God’s will that we suffer; but what can God do with the problems that will come into our lives, to accomplish His will in our life?  That’s our course today, and that’s what we want to look at.  So to start that, I want to start by reading a couple pieces of scripture to you.

The first one is from 1Peter and then there’s one from Romans.  The word of God for us today:

From 1 Peter 4:12.  “Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you.”

Then, from Romans 8:28.  “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to His purpose.”

Let’s pray. 

Mighty holy God we thank you for your word and for your faithfulness and how you do not abandon us, just as you did not abandon Noah.  Lord we ask that you would help us hear what you have for us this day.  We ask it in your name.  Amen.

Well we want to address this question and I want to kind of frame it by looking back at a painful period in my life.  It was the fall of 1980.  Now for some of you that probably was before you were born and that’s okay, but I had just graduated from college the previous year and I was living in a small town in central California.  I was living five miles out of that town on an old dairy farm.  It was a wonderful life.  We were living in the old milkers’ house, and we had horses to ride; we had a garden that we were growing a lot of our food on; and it was a wonderful thing.  The best part was at night because the only things you heard were the crickets and then a passing train now and then in the distance.  It was a wonderful life and my then wife and I loved living in the country.  I worked in town about five miles away at a lumber company.  We lived at kind of like the foothills of the Sierra Nevada’s.  We were two hours away from Yosemite Valley.  We talk about how busy Yosemite Valley is, I had it practically all to myself to cross country ski one winter day just because we were that close; and we could live that way.  So it was a great life and I enjoyed everything that I had going there.  And yet, in July of 1980, God kind of got a hold of us and persuaded us to move to this place called Minnesota. 

So in one month we packed up our things and we were on our way; and as we were leaving, some of our friends go “Oh, you are moving to the east coast?”  Well not quite, I don’t think so.  But that’s how Californians are, I guess, so.  So we packed up in one month and we were on the road.  When we left we didn’t know where we were going to live when we landed in Minnesota.  We didn’t have much money and there was a whole lot of uncertainty.  So when we landed in Minnesota, it took an extraordinary long period of time for us to finally find a place to call home.  After a long time we landed in the upstairs of a duplex on 36^th and Chicago in South Minneapolis.  Now if you know about 36^th and Chicago, Chicago Avenue is one of the major bus lines in the Metropolitan Transit Authorities.  So as a result there were buses going by our house 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  It was a little bit of a shift for me to move from the quiet idyllic country life to now living in the midst of all the noise and everything that went on in the city.  What I longed for more than anything else was to get home from work at night to take the dog and walk into the fields and watch the sunset.  But it was gone.  I wrestled with “God what are you doing?  Why did you bring me out here, God?  What is going on?”  I wanted to go back to California.  I wanted to go back to what I called home in the worst way.  I wanted my old life back.  This isn’t what I signed up for.  So I began kind of dialoguing with God.  One of the pieces that really stuck out for me as I was in this constant dialogue, saying “God, why did you bring me here?” and as I say that I am thinking about the Israelites going into the wilderness; and one night I wasn’t sleeping, which was typically the case, it was well after midnight and I said “I can’t do this anymore.  I’ve got to get up.”  I got up and I went for a run.   I went about two blocks away to a park next to where we were living called Powderhorn Park.  I was running around Powderhorn Park probably about one o’clock in the morning.  As I was running I was yelling at God. I was angry. I was half crying and, as I was running and kind of letting God have it, I realized there were two people walking towards me.  All of a sudden, you know how reality kind of crashes into your world, you go “Wait a sec.  I just did something potentially very stupid.  I am running through a park in the dark way after midnight and I don’t know who these folks are.”  So, I am running and I’m still kind of angry. I’m hoping they heard me crying and yelling and going “This man is crazy and I am not going near him.”  But that was my life for the first year that I landed in Minnesota.  I wanted to go back and it took me a year to work through that, to finally get to the point where I began to feel a little more comfortable.  From that period in my life I began to see how God uses the pain in our life for good.  And that’s what we want to look at today.  What I want to do is frame it around my story, my move if you will call it that. 

One of the things that I think about is how can God accomplish His will in our life through our trouble, through our pain, through our suffering?  I think one of the ways that God can do that is by changing our ways.  One of the ways I think that God kind of changes us is through our failures.  Einstein said that “if we continue to do the same thing over and over again and expect to get different results, we’re idiots.”  It’s the same for our failures.  If we don’t learn from our mistakes then we’re in trouble.  Failures help us learn how to do it right the next time, isn’t that right, guys?  How many of you have started one of those home projects or “honey do” projects?  You start undoing stuff and all of a sudden three or four more things fall apart, and all of a sudden you’re going “On my goodness what have I gotten myself into?”  We learn how to do it right the next time, don’t we?  That’s the same way with our troubles.  When we work through those troubles they help us know how to do it right, perhaps the next time.  Because a lot of times the troubles we get ourselves into are a result of maybe mistakes we that we’ve had.  So God changes us through our failures, I think. 

God also changes us by bringing us to submission to His desires.  For me, the job I had at the lumber company I liked.  I loved it.  I enjoyed doing what I was doing.  I enjoyed the people I worked with.  But I knew that if I stayed there, there weren’t any opportunities to kind of move to the next level which would be kind of an assistant manager.  If there had been an opening there were like three or four small yards in the area where we lived.  If there had been an opening I probably would have stayed hoping I would have been promoted to that job.  But there wasn’t and so it made sense for me to leave.  I think God knew exactly what He was doing.  He made me leave because, guess what?  Two weeks after I left, an assistant manager job opened up.  If I had known that I probably wouldn’t have moved to Minnesota.  So God kind of gets His hands around us and begins to kind of bring us around to His will sometimes through submission. 

God uses pain in our lives to change us, to begin to make us more like Him; and that leads us right into the second piece that God does in accomplishing His will through our problems and that is to mold us.  Do you know what God’s highest will for our lives, for any of our lives, is?  That we would become like His son Jesus; that we would be Jesus in the flesh in our world, in our situation.  That’s God’s desire for us.  So God desires to mold us.  One of the ways that God molds us is through endurance.  Endurance is kind of that ability to hang in there, to kind of work it through until it is no longer a problem, until it’s not an issue anymore.  Like I said it took me a year before I began to feel comfortable here in the Twin Cities.  And you know what?  It worked, because I still live here.  I realized as I was thinking about this this week and revisiting this, that I now have lived in the Twin Cities longer than I ever lived in California growing up.  So God has done and brought me here; and the idea of moving back to California now for sure, and even probably after a year, held no appeal for me.  You couldn’t pay me enough to move back to southern California right now.  I don’t want to live there.  I think that a key piece of building that endurance in our lives is seeing God work in our lives.  When I was here during that first year, God put me in the middle of a very powerful ministry to high school students.  It was a ministry that I now continue to kind of hold up in my mind as the bar to which all other ministries need to measure up.  It was one of those ministries where I learned what good ministries smelled like, taste like, and felt like how it was done.  I learned that, and so that is my bar now.  Every now and then I’ll have a now middle-aged person come up to me and go “You know what?  I was in Summit with you.”  And I’m like “Oh.”  That was very cool that they recognized me but it also made me feel really old.  But that was the impact that this ministry had and God placed me right in the middle of it.  I’m like “Wow!”  So I’m not a native Minnesotan.  But I have learned a little bit about Ole and Lena now.  I’ve also gotten to the point when it gets below fifty degrees I don’t run for the long johns.  We know Chris still does that.  He will finally get over it.  He will finally figure it out.  His blood will get a little thicker.  It’ll be okay.  But God molds us with endurance. 

God also molds us through deepening our dependence on God.  In the midst of our troubles, we lean on God more; we look for him; we desire him more during those hard times because he meets us in the middle of that pain.  He meets us in a variety of ways-- maybe it’s a physical need, maybe someone brings you dinner.  We had checks show up out of the blue when we most needed it.  Maybe it was a phone call with someone just encouraging you somehow.  Maybe it was someone just simply standing in the gap for you.  God brings us to His desire, to His will I should say, by increasing our dependence on Him. 

God also molds us through growing us in our compassion.  When you experienced something in your life and kind of worked through it, endured through it, when you see someone else who has experienced that same kind of pain what happens?  Your heart goes out to them right away, doesn’t it, because you’ve been there?  You’ve experienced that.  You know what it feels like for whatever it is that person is going through.  That’s what happens when we walk through pain.  I want to give you an opportunity to hear that first hand from someone here at Faith.  Jennifer Matson has experienced a lot of difficult times in her life; but, in the process of that, she has learned and God has used it to grow a compassionate heart.  So Jennifer, I want to invite you to come forward now and just tell us a little bit of your story, how God has used you to grow in compassion.

Jennifer:  “Just for a moment you are one of seven people living in an eight hundred square foot home.  The home has never been fully constructed.  It has only particle board on its floors and the sheet rock has never been taped, primed or painted.  The kitchen has no cabinets. Its few dishes are stored in a cardboard box.  The kitchen table is held together with duct tape and has no chairs.  The bedroom has no curtains, closets, doors, sheets or blankets; just mattresses on the floor.  The few articles of clothes are stored in cardboard boxes because there are no dressers.  The bathroom has no sink or shower, just a tub and a toilet.  In fact the bathroom doesn’t even have a door, just an Army blanket nailed to the frame to offer a little privacy.  The living room, well it doesn’t exist.  When entertaining the guests at this house they are offered the very best seat in the house, the bed.  No, this isn’t a new reality TV show but rather a little brief glimpse into my childhood home.  I grew up in poverty.  It is not the condition of this house or the lack of the material possessions that I described that caused me great pain as a child, rather the financial struggles I witnessed my mom suffer through.  She struggled with coming up with enough money to keep the electricity on and the water running, and she often failed.  She struggled with “robbing Peter to pay Paul” as she called her lottery method of making payments to all who threatened to turn her into collection agencies.  She struggled to keep five growing children in shoes and warm clothes often having to make us go without.  She struggled to keep food on the table.  The teachers, sensing our hunger, usually packed extra food to share with us.  One year while on Christmas break and unable to take advantage of our teachers’ generosity, we went an entire week eating nothing but cornmeal boiled in water.  As hard as the hunger and the lack of enthusiasm for more cornmeal mush was, it was nothing compared to the pain I felt when I could feel my mother hurt at the realization that she could not provide for her own children.  She struggled to keep a roof over our head; and one morning while I was getting ready for school, I was informed that she had failed at that too.  We had lost our home.  Each child was given a brown paper grocery bag to pack their clothes and favorite possessions in.  When dropped at school mom informed the teachers she would not be returning for us.  She asked the teachers if they would help us find a place to live until she could return sometime.  My siblings and I were separated and moved about from family to family.  My parents spent that time living in a tent.  After nine months all but my two older siblings were reunited under one roof.  We eventually “got our feet back on the ground” my mom would say and today I live a life filled with many material excesses and luxuries.  There was a lot of pain growing up in poverty but God has incorporated that pain into part of who I am today.  My pain is no longer just about me but about helping those like me.  God has turned my pain into compassion for others who struggle and a desire to serve God by serving others.  Words cannot express how deeply thankful to God I am for the opportunity to give back to others what God has given me.  My heartfelt thanks goes out to my Savior for helping me through the many challenges of my childhood, and for giving me here in this church the opportunity to give back with programs such as the ICA Food Shelf, Loaves and Fishes and, most importantly to me, Families Moving Forward, a program which is very dear to me because it keeps families without housing together under one roof.”

Thank you Jennifer, for the courage to share that.  I appreciate that.  God uses our pain in powerful, powerful ways to open our hearts so that we would grow in compassion.  Jennifer is a living example of that in our lives.  So God accomplishes His will through our problems, through changing us, through molding us and through preparing us.  God sometimes uses the suffering in our life, the pain in our life, to prepare us for something else.  C.S. Lewis says that “God speaks to us in our pleasure but He shouts at us in our pain.”  When we’re in trouble, God has our attention, doesn’t He?  He is right there and we are reaching out saying “God I need your help.  I need you right now.”  And yet when things are good, we are kind of like a little more on our own and saying “I got it God.  I got it.  I got it here.”  But when we’re in trouble, God has our full attention, even when we are running around the park in the middle of the night.  We don’t take our eyes off of God; and, as a result, it gives us the opportunity to put down deep roots into our faith that make us more stable, that make us more secure, that make us stronger.  That’s part of the preparation that God does when He brings pain into our lives.  Trouble also prepares us for something new or perhaps some kind of new opportunity.  One of the ways he prepares us for something new, in my case, was He prepared me for today.  I mean if I had gone back to California, what do you think the chances are that I’d be standing here this morning?  Probably pretty small, wouldn’t they?  And as a result of going through what I did, it has made me the person I am today because I struggled through that time.  That’s preparing us for something new.

 Another way that God prepares us is to prepare us for something new that He is going to unfold into our lives.  I was, for lack of a better word, the camp pastor of a camp in Siren, Wisconsin.  If you remember in 2001, there was a tornado that went through Siren, Wisconsin, and it went right through the camp that I was a part of and you can see some of the pictures of the destruction.  The top one on this side, that concrete slab was where a cabin was where children sleep.  When the tornado went through there were parents, 65 third and fourth graders at camp at that time.  Imagine your child in third or fourth grade going through an F3 tornado with 15 staff.  They were in the basement, if you call it that, of the walk out dining hall, which is this guy right here.  When the tornado went through, not one scratch was on a child or staff person.  Not one scratch.  And, look what happened; God had His hand in this.  God had His hand in this because this camp was situated, sandwiched really, between two privately owned lake cabins.  There were cabins all around except for this camp.  The camp wanted to grow; there was no room to grow.  The church that owned the camp really didn’t have the appetite to take on the finances to talk about relocating it to somewhere else.  So God brought a tornado, wiped it off the map, literally.  As a result there was a lot of pain, a lot of hurt, a lot of suffering that the congregation went through as a result of that.  But as they began to move through the grief, they began to see a new opportunity that God was presenting them.  Three years later, they purchased a piece of land in central Minnesota that was larger, that had the opportunity for growth.  They’ve just completed a building campaign that allows them to do everything that they want to do.  It is out of our pain that God can all of a sudden open up a whole new window for us.  God uses our pain in a powerful way to accomplish His will in our lives.  God’s desire is that we will become more like Christ.  He desires that we would do that by changing us, by molding us and by preparing us. 

So the question for each of us today is to say “Okay what’s going on in my life?  Where are those places in my life where things aren’t so good, where I’m hurting or where there is just trouble a-brewing?  What is it for our lives?”  And then to take that next step, the probably more courageous step, and to say “God, what might you want to do with whatever it is in your life?  How might you like to conform me more to your Son?  What is it that you want to do that you want to teach me?”  It’s a conversation for you and God to talk about, and as you do that, guess what?  That’s an invitation, isn’t it?  It’s an invitation for you to seek our God.  He’s ready.  He’s willing. He doesn’t care if you raise your voice or shake your fist at him.  He can handle it.  Are you game?  Amen.

Let me pray for us.  Mighty and holy God Lord it is a difficult place in which we live and there is trouble in our world and it will inevitably come to our doorstep.  Lord help us not to be overwhelmed by it.  Help us to express our emotions but also to embrace it knowing God that you can use all things, not only the good things, but you can use bad things as well to do a great work in this world and in our lives.  So Lord I ask that you would help us do that.  We ask it in your name.  Amen.