I don’t understand.  Not everything.  Even when I pretend to be OK with the way things are, with circumstances and the way something turned out, with an unexpected ending, or a twist to our life’s story that I didn’t see coming, I don’t understand.

As much as we want for life to take us along the high places and as hard as we yearn for a life of mountaintop experiences, that was never promised to us.  And if you stop for a moment and look back at your own stories, I know you’ll find pages written in your own hand, stained with your tears.  Pages you wish didn’t exist.  Pages filled with pain.

We all hide those pages.

We tell ourselves we’re hiding them from others, but in reality, we’re hiding them from ourselves.

Why?

Because they don’t make sense.  Because in our limited world view, we cannot reconcile a loving God with horrific memories.  We cannot understand how the God of peace allows such things to happen.  The pages written in our own hand don’t line up with the pages penned by the God of the universe.

And when something that big doesn’t make sense, everything we believe begins to tremble.

So we begin to believe something is wrong with us.  If God is perfect, and our world consists of God and us, then we must be the one at fault.  Even though we cannot understand it, even though it doesn’t make sense, even though it feels like we’re denying something deep within us that is in it’s own way truth, we hide those pages.  We pretend the scars don’t exist, we pretend that we don’t see ourselves, daily, as broken individuals.

We pretend.  And we pretend that we pretend for others.  But in reality, we pretend so it’s easier to lie to ourselves.

We’ve forgotten something.  Something important.  Something we knew as children, something that our favorite movies and books tell us.  We’ve forgotten that we are not the only ones in our story.  There is God, there is each of us, and there is an enemy.

John Eldredge said that
“Of all the eternal truths we don’t believe, this is the one we doubt most of all….  You are not what you think you are.  There is a glory to your life that your Enemy fears, and he is hell-bent on destroying that glory before you act on it.  

This part of the answer will sound unbelievable at first; perhaps it will sound too good to be true: certainly, you will wonder if it’s true for you.  But once you begin to see with those eyes, once you have begun to know it is true from the bottom of your heart, it will change everything.

The story of your life is the long and brutal assault on your heart by the one who knows what you could be and fears it”

Do not be mistaken.  There is an enemy.  He is real.  And he is desperate to destroy you.

Your days are not accidental.  Those tear-stained pages are not shameful pages.  They shouldn’t be hidden.  They are your glory.  They are proof that you are valuable.  That you are worth something precious.  Those pages hold the stories that carry freedom in them.  You were created by a loving God.  A God who cares intimately about you, about where you are, right now.  About what you’re worrying about.  You were created, specifically, for this time.  And you have a purpose that only you can fulfill.

In those pages lie the words, the stories, that others need to hear.

For it is in those stories that this loving God cared for you.  And if you ask Him, He will show you.

You never walked alone.

And those pages?  Those aren’t just your tears.  He cried to.

Matt Redman – Never Once