A dear friend gave me a book titled, simply, His Parables. It’s a devotional book with a lesson for each day of the year. I read it as part of my morning Bible study time. The book is divided into sections, each of which focuses on one of Jesus’s parables including supporting or related verses from other parts of the Bible. Biblical scholars from various eras provide commentary on the parables, one each day. I love the different perspectives and wise teachings. Many of them leave me pondering the complexity behind these seemingly simple stories.
A recent follow up to the story of the wedding feast (told in Matthew chapter 22) talked about the need to completely surrender your will to the Lord. In other words, as we say in the Lord’s Prayer, “thy will be done” and truly mean it. The author Hannah Whitall Smith says this:
It is wonderful what miracles God works in wills that are utterly surrendered to Him. He turns hard things into easy, and bitter things into sweet. It is not that He puts easy things in the place of the hard, but He actually changes the hard thing into an easy one.
Now wait a minute.
I object to that statement. I’d like to understand how you can say that, Mrs. Smith. What evidence do you provide? Those last three sentences complete her very short commentary entitled “The Rewards of Surrender.” Unfortunately, that conversation will never happen since she died in 1911. According to the Wikipedia entry about her, she did not live a blissful life. Her husband was a serial adulterer and four of her seven children did not survive to adulthood.
I’d specifically like to ask her how losing more than half of her offspring would ever be an “easy thing.”
I do understand that God has ordained the number of our years (Psalm 139:16). There is nothing I could have done to change the fact of my daughter’s death. I am certain that she is in Heaven and that I will see her there some day. But, her absence from me here on Earth is a hard thing. It is not sweet.
There are many, many instances of hard things happening to people in the Bible. King Saul and David’s own son, Absalom turned against him and he had to run away and hide in order to save his life. Job, who was a rich but pious man, lost everything EVERYTHING in his life except his wife. And had to sit and listen to his “friends” tell him that he must have done something bad to deserve all this. The apostle Stephen was stoned to death. Paul encouraged that stoning. He eventually was converted and came to believe Jesus was the Christ, but then he was imprisoned and tortured.
I don’t think any of these people thought these things were easy.
Here’s what I believe. I believe God comforts us when we are hurting, scared, sad, despairing. (See Matthew 5:4, Psalm 119:76, Joshua 1:9, 2Corinthians 1:3-4, and Psalm 23:4) His Word doesn’t say we won’t have hard things. It says He will comfort us in those hard things.
It hurts that my daughter died. It was devastating to me and to many others. It changed me as a person just as much as becoming her mother did. Something that monumental to my life should not be easy. It should, and did, make me realize how much I need God. For comfort, yes. But, also for patience, acceptance, and gratitude. Patience to wait on answers to my WHY questions. Acceptance that those answers may not come in this lifetime. And, gratitude that He offers me forgiveness now and eventual welcome into His eternal presence where all will be made clear.
The waiting is hard. But, worth it.
Laura
A Light for My Path 
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