Maranatha & Mission: How Can God Use Pain for the Sake of Those Around Us?

By amazon Tuesday, September 17, 2019 Comment Edit

What if tragedy is only the beginning of God's victorious story?

Today we continue our series written by two of my staff—Josh Laxton and Laurie Nichols—about how to process all the tough stuff we are facing in our world today. You can hear Josh and Laurie talk about important issues like these on our new Billy Graham Center weekly podcast called Living in the Land of Oz. Yesterday, Josh introduced the idea of Maranatha. You can find it here. Today, Laurie, who serves as Director of Marketing and Communications at the Billy Graham Center, continues.

Few are likely comfortable with that fine, old passage from Ecclesiastes 3:

There is a time for everything,and a season for every activity under the heavens:a time to be born and a time to die,a time to plant and a time to uproot,a time to kill and a time to heal,a time to tear down and a time to build,a time to weep and a time to laugh,a time to mourn and a time to dance,a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,a time to search and a time to give up,a time to keep and a time to throw away,a time to tear and a time to mend,a time to be silent and a time to speak,a time to love and a time to hate,a time for war and a time for peace.

Who, after all, wants the worse of each couplet? Death, being uprooted, killing, tearing down, weeping, mourning, scattering, refraining from love, giving up, throwing away, silence, hate, war. No thanks.

Any of us who have lived one moment of honest life and who have experienced one significant moment of pain knows the after-effects of these negative actions. When tragedy strikes, when disappointment emerges, when depression seeks to pull us under, as followers of Christ, our first (and correct) instinct is, “Maranatha!”

Come, Lord ...