God places candles in the dark, not the sunshine

I posted the other day about Suffering when you do good. Today, with the massive tornado in Moore, I am thinking simply about suffering. The verse that popped into my head was that God sends rain on the just and unjust alike. My instinct is that bad things happen to everyone, and I'll talk more about that in a minute.

So I went to look up the verse that is in my head, and once again, the Bible amazes me. It always gently corrects and refocuses me, like when you manually handle the lens of a camera. Wherever you turn, you adjust--sometimes a lot, sometimes just a little, to bring things into proper focus. The verse in my head is actually words of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount: "But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" (Matthew 5:44-45).

Jesus is not talking about rain as if it's a bad thing (which was my thinking). In this verse, He is addressing the question, "Why do good things happen to bad people?" Our hearts must be generous and loving towards those who do wrong, because our Father is good to everyone (sending them sunshine and valuable rain). Jesus once again flips everything on its head. Bad people get helped! Bad people see things work out for them! Our Father is amazing and good and generous. We, those of us who wear His name, need to love with that kind of generosity.


Now let's go back and look at good people suffering in a natural disaster. It would be weird if a storm swept through an area and the homes of God-followers were spared. An event like that would indicate judgment, and Jesus did not come two thousand years ago for judgment. John 3:17 says, "For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him." Jesus WILL come someday to judge the earth, but now, we are in mercy-mode. God's kindness and patience are leading people to repentance (Romans 2:4, 2 Peter 3:9).

In Egypt, the first-born of every household died, except those (Jew or Egyptian) who paint their doorway with lamb's blood. If anyone (Jew or Egyptian) sprinkled blood on their doorway, their first-born was spared. When people awoke after the Passover, there was wailing and screaming, and the Jews were told to leave. That's judgment.

If believers were spared in a crisis, we would ourselves become prideful. But even if we reached out to those around us, we would be Other, someone distant who didn't suffer.

This is why Jesus came to the earth in the first place. He is Immanuel...God with us. He was not content watching our suffering from a distance; He stepped in. And He didn't merely fix our circumstances; He fixed our hearts. God tends to do things slowly, so that we see and grasp it. It's like He is saying to us, "You don't need your circumstances easy, child. You need Me." And if our circumstances were easy, we would never learn the joy of Him. We would be happy because of our circumstances, and the pain of this world would go on, happening to others.

But when we know Him, and we see the world hurting, we run to the pain, just like Jesus, our brother and savior, ran to us.

And when bad things happen--like an EF-4 tornado--our homes are stripped away along with those who don't know the joy of Jesus. And we let our homes go, because they are not as important as the world seeing our Lord. The trappings are stripped away--we wouldn't ever choose this!--and there we are, still loving Jesus and praising Him in our pain.

Sometimes we even lose a child.

And then we are Immanuel, the body of Christ, the Spirit of God dwelling in flesh and wrestling with the horror and holding on to Someone Invisible. We are light in a dark world. Sometimes it gets very dark.

You don't have to muster the light yourself. It has been put there inside of you. And light shines in darkness. Always.