In light of recent tragedies—our nation’s
unrelenting drought, excessive heat, and crop failures, for example, and the massacre
in Aurora, Colorado—the following well-known tale takes on new relevance:
A shipwreck survivor, alone on a desert
island, prayed for God to rescue him.
He built a hut and waited for God to
answer.
Day after day, he prayed.
Then one day his hut burned to the
ground.
He was devastated. Not only had God failed
to rescue him, now He also let the hut burn down! Why? Why?
The next day a ship arrived and rescued
the man.
“How did you know I was here?” he asked
the captain.
“We saw your smoke signal.”
Cavin Harper told that story Saturday
on his blog at Christian Grandparenting Network. His perspective was spot on for
memoirists, whether writing for children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, or a
broader audience.
Cavin wrote,
“Our grandchildren need
to know
that no matter what may come,
God knows how to make smoke signals
and
rescue us in our troubles.
How do you communicate words of hope
to your grandchildren in the face of tragedy
and senseless violence?
As much as we long to live happily ever
after, bad stuff happens to good people.
Like Jesus said in John 16:33, “In this
world you will have trouble.”
You’ve experienced trouble and sorrows—maybe
even violence, crime, abuse. I’ve experienced trouble. Your readers will
experience trouble. What stories can you
write to help people survive their shipwrecks and burned huts?
One of my all-time favorite Bible
passages is Psalm 77 in which Asaph spoke of crying out to God. “When I cried
out in distress, I sought the Lord; at night I stretched out untiring hands and
my soul refused to be comforted.”
Asaph said he was too troubled even to
speak.
You’ve been there, I’m sure. I’ve been
there, too.
Perhaps you recall torturous weeks or
months or years when you, like Asaph, wondered: “Will the Lord … never show his
favor again? Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed
for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful?”
Next is the part I like best:
Asaph says, “This is my anguish; But I
will remember …” (v. 10, NKJV). “I
will remember,” he stated, “the
works of the Lord.”
The NIV Study Bible footnote points out
that this was Asaph’s “Faith’s decision
to look beyond the present troubles—and God’s bewildering inactivity—to draw
help anew from God’s saving acts of old.”
That’s it! We cope by remembering what
God did in the past!
And, like Asaph, we make a
deliberate decision to trust in
God’s previous faithfulness to us. We make
a deliberate
decision to believe that even if God seems mysteriously absent, He is
working it all out.
Think back to a trying situation in
your life. Perhaps God seemed absent, but later you discovered He had been working
everything out. You survived. You learned new things about yourself and about
God. You went on with your life, and it was good.
Asaph, in the very next chapter of
Psalms, writes this:
“We will tell the next generation the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, his
power, and the wonders he has done.… which he commanded our forefathers to teach their children, so the next
generation would know them, even the
children yet to be born, and they in turn would tell their children. Then they
would put their trust in God…” (Psalm 78:4-7).
Isn’t that what our
memoirs are all about?
Remember what Cavin Harper wrote in his
Saturday blog post: “Our grandchildren
need to know that no matter what may come, God knows how to make smoke signals
and rescue us in our troubles. How do you communicate words of hope to your
grandchildren in the face of tragedy and senseless violence?”
No comments:
Post a Comment