Suffering Isn't Always For Our Good

As I've mentioned before, I'm currently working my way through Beth Moore's book, Breaking Free: Day by Day and I find it to be a wonderful compliment to God's word as I walk through this season of my life.  In today's reading, it pointed me back to Matthew 26, in which we get a small look into the things in the last hours leading up to Christ's death on the cross.  While in the garden, one of His disciples stepped up and chose to defend Jesus with his sword (this coming just after not being able to stay awake even long enough just to pray....but that's a different blog topic!)  At this point Christ spoke these words:

{Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?  But how then would the scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen this way?}  Matthew 26:53-54

I believe that it was Christ's fleshly desire to call out on those angels and be taken from the grief and despair he had been so lamenting in that garden.  However, because He is the One who wrote the story of redemption and who authored the unfailing love we so desperately desire, He knew what needed to come.  You see, even though I didn't write my story of redemption, I know the One who did.  I know Him personally, intimately.  I know Him in these precious ways because of the times in which I've had to lean solely on Him to get me through.  And I know that in Him, all things do work together for our good.

However, the title of my post suggests that it isn't always for our good.  This could be a bit confusing, I am fully aware.  We will always be blessed when God is glorified through our story.  What a marvelous God we serve.  But sometimes the blessings we receive are secondary benefits of a story that our God has written for the primary benefit of another.  Stay with me here.  If we believed that all of the things that have come to pass for my little family only so that God could bless just us, we would so be missing the mark.  When Christ died on that cross, he was carrying out his Father's will.  His Father had decided before time began, that He would sacrifice His only Son, for the benefit of us. Christ knew suffering, more than any of us ever will.  But His suffering was for us!  Now, when suffering comes to us, do we see it as a way that God can use it for the good of others in ways that we may never see or understand?  I believe that if we know this to be true of our own suffering, that we may not even see it as suffering at all.  Here is what Beth Moore has to say about it all..

"Jesus obviously had the power to open heaven and earth and swallow his opposition, but He didn't.  He trusted the sovereignty of His Father.  In difficult times, we too need to trust God's sovereignty.  This means that if He has allowed something difficult or shocking to happen to one of His children, He plans to use it mightily, if the child will let Him..."

Well, I believe that while I've been blessed beyond belief through the difficult seasons I've walked in my life, I also believe that it is my responsibility to allow God to use it mightily.   That is my prayer today.  "God use Your story that has been written for me in ways that are exceedingly, abundantly beyond all that I could ask or think..."