People As God’s Instruments In the Hurts of Life

LIFE is a pulveriser.

If we are vulnerable enough to be real, God will utilise our vulnerability and bring realness into our orbit.

Realness hurts.

And there is nothing more real than other people as they rub up against us.

People will hurt us in just being people.

People who are trying to love never set out to hurt us. They never want others to feel as they would hate to feel. Those trying to love.

But people who are agents not of love but of hurt are being used by God, and his will is to refine us.

Don’t get me wrong. God never wills it that people hurt us. But he does will it that we reflect over what happened and, more so even, over our response.

It’s not about other people. God is using them for us.

God never wants to rub our noses in the dirt of other people’s abuse of us. Never, ever.

But as we turn in within ourselves — inviting God’s Spirit to speak — we will intuit the notions for growth and development out of a single interaction.

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There is an opportunity in our hurts beyond healing. Indeed, the opportunity is the healing.

The opportunity is see people as the vehicle for God’s communication; they are God’s mouthpieces — not that they of themselves ever speak for God.

But God speaks to us through our response to the poisonous darts flung our way.

This is very little about what is done against us. It’s much more about what God is doing in us.

The opportunity is to have God speak to us through our behaviour. As we act we are. As we act we have chosen. It’s no good saying we “didn’t mean it” when we have done what we have done. What we did is now part of our history.

The only way to reconcile our recalcitrant response is to repent.

The life of faith is not about others when they are recalcitrant; it’s about our recalcitrant selves.

God is so gracious. He will not condemn us or judge us or rebuke us. God is closest to the one who is broken and of a contrite heart (Psalm 51:16-17).

The Lord revives us as we listen to his heartbeat in the hurts of our lives.

God is good in that he is the way, the truth, and the life. He will lead us, even as people are instruments he will use in our growth.

© 2015 S. J. Wickham.