Wednesday 12 October 2016

Seeing God's hand in everything

Joseph said to his brothers… “I am your brother Joseph, the one you sold into Egypt. And now, don’t be distressed and don’t be angry with yourselves for selling me here, because it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you…” Genesis 45:4-5

These are wonderful words. As a boy Joseph was certainly foolish in the way he spoke to his parents and his brothers about the great future God had in store for him. But that could never excuse the cruelty and callousness with which his brothers treated him. He suffered enormously as a result. He lost years of his life – years that he could never get back.

Yet when eventually, in his splendour, he meets them again, he is able to speak these words of comfort and, implicitly, of forgiveness. No anger. No recriminations.

On the contrary, he is able to see a purpose – a divine purpose – in what has happened to him: “God sent me ahead of you…”

Shaving this morning, I idly put the radio on to help pass the time. I found myself listening to a woman who, around the age of fourteen, was raped and tortured by two young men. She spoke about the struggle she has had in order to make some kind of recovery from this trauma; but, cutting the story short, she described how she has ended up as a psychiatrist specialising in helping people who have had similar traumatic experiences.

It was massively heartening to hear her story. I found two things she said specially striking.

First, when asked if she felt angry with the young men involved, she replied (using my own words): not so much angry as curious about what led them to act in this way. How can anybody – and especially anybody so young – be capable of such a thing? She didn’t suggest that such behaviour could be excused or condoned, but she felt determined to explore its roots. It was this that led her to become a mental health specialist.

Second, and this struck me even more forcibly, she described one of the main lessons she had learned. Here I am quoting her fairly accurately: What matters is not so much what happens to us, but what we do with what happens to us.

In other words, she suggested that we can, if we so choose, make a decision to benefit even from horrors. At no point in the interview (not the part I heard, anyway) was there any mention of religious experience or conviction. But she could have been echoing Joseph: in effect, “I have become a better person, and done good I otherwise would never have done, as a result of what happened to me.”

Over my years as a minister there have been times I have tried to help people whose lives have been blighted by horrible experiences. I have found that, usually, I have little to offer except a willingness to listen, to speak a few (hopefully) healing words, to try and bring a biblical perspective to the situation, and of course to pray. I’ve never felt I’ve done much good.

But neither have I ever felt it right to say, as Joseph might have, and as the woman on the radio might have, “You can take control of your life, and your past, and turn them to good.” Why not? Because nothing seriously horrible has ever happened to me (how fortunate I have been!). It has never seemed right to tell others something which, yes, I do believe, and which, yes, in a very real way I feel I have learned from my own experience, but which, given their circumstances, they could only discover for themselves.

Which is why it was helpful to hear someone talking in this way who has indeed “been there, done that”.

The Bible has a lot to say about God’s “providence”.  This rather old-fashioned word simply means God working out a positive purpose in our lives in spite of all its ups and downs. The classic Bible verse is Romans 8:28: “… in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose”.

This calls, of course, for faith in God and a determination to trace his purposes even in the darkness – to “trace the rainbow through the rain”, as an old hymn puts it. To pray – and, when we find this impossible, to ask others to pray for us. Never to despair. Never to shrug our shoulders and give up.

If the Joseph story is the classic story, and Romans 8:28 the classic text, perhaps the classic hymn, still popular after nearly three hundred years, is William Cowper’s “God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.”

Cowper – who knew a fair bit about suffering – has left to the church some magnificent words: “Behind a frowning providence/ [God] hides a smiling face.” And: “The bud may have a bitter taste,/ But sweet will be the flower”.

May that be the testimony of all of us!

Lord, help me by your grace to take authority even over the bad things that have happened to me, and to watch in faith as, slowly but surely, you turn them to good. Amen.

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