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As our perspective changes, our feelings about who God is and how he relates to us can change – often times for the negative. The truth we have to preach to ourselves is that God does not change, and he will always be perfectly loving and GOOD.
The past couple of weeks have been hard on the Harvey Family. In the span of ten days, Lindsay and I each buried a grandmother, have passed a terrible cold to each other, and on the way back from Lindsay’s grandmother’s visitation, I ran into a median and blew out a tire – an hour away from home. Of course, the absence of our grandmothers has been extremely hard, and subsequently I have been feeling very blah for the past couple of weeks. It has been an easy excuse to throw a pity party for myself, and honestly, to be upset with God at the timing of it all. My thought originally was, “Okay, God, what are you trying to teach me?” It soon degraded into, “Okay, God, this is unfair and really tough – and I’m tired of it.” So today, after spending around 6 hours driving around on a donut trying to get my tire situation resolved, I had pretty much reached my breaking point.
“God, this is not what I had envisioned for the end of this year. I serve you – and I don’t think this is how you should be treating ME.”
(what a self-centered, prideful, arrogant and disgustingly sinful thought this is – and yet, here we are)
So after sitting in 2 hours worth of traffic on the way home from trying to get my car fixed in Nashville, I pulled into Chipotle and to grab some dinner.
To make a long story short, I ran into a family (mom, dad, young kid) who I did not know as they were in front of me buying their dinner. The child waved at me, so I smiled and waved back. The dad saw that exchange and then interacted with me about the benefits of buying a burrito bowl instead of a burrito (to which I agreed), and I offered that asking for both white and brown rice was a good way to get more food for your dollar. We laughed for a second about the fun nature of trying to scheme your way into more food, and the family was on their way. As I got to the register, the lady behind the counter informed me that I could “Have a great night” before I had even paid for my food; the confused look on my face caused her to continue on and say, “The man in front of you paid for your meal.”
I hurried over to the man before he could leave and shook his hand. He had done something for me out of the kindness of his heart that I did absolutely nothing to deserve (see The Gospel). I walked over and sat in my car, texted my wife to tell her what happened; and then with tears in my eyes, God said to me:
“See? I haven’t forgotten about you.”
Now, let me be clear – God’s answer to my humanly, flesh-centered thought above rightfully could (and should) have been much harsher than the sign he sent to me through a man in Chipotle. Maybe God knew that in my stubbornness, a gentle reminder of God’s kindness was better than the slap in the face that I deserved. But a small, kind, gesture from this man I had known for 30 seconds shocked me back to reality and reminded me of the truth of who God is.
The world is broken place, and often our circumstances threaten to take a real toll on our bodies, hearts, and minds. In those moments, we have to remember to preach the truth to ourselves time after time. I don’t know about you, but I lie to myself 1000% more than I ever lie to anyone else. Those thoughts can really do damage on our perspective – how we view our own life and how we view others – especially God. As our perspective changes, our feelings about who God is and how he relates to us can change – often times for the negative. The truth we have to preach to ourselves is that God does not change, and he will always be perfectly loving and GOOD.
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