Trusting For a Good We Cannot See
Alicia Wright
“And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” —Romans 8:28
Many years ago, I heard someone describe the Christian life as being like a flea living in the depths of a colorful, deep rug. Looking around him, he believes wholeheartedly that the world is tall, fibrous, and green. After several hops, he lands in another place and his perspective changes. Now the world is blue, and he feels a little disoriented but has learned something new. Spending all of his short life in the rug, his perspective changes with his movements, but he never considers that far beyond the rug an entire universe exists—with furniture, people, houses, cities, continents, skies, and a cosmos filled with innumerable planets, galaxies, and unknowns he will never peer into.
When I consider Romans 8:28, I feel like that flea. I’ve seen some good that God has worked out of pain and grief in my life and in the lives of those I love, but it doesn’t feel like those glimpses are enough. The snippets I see bring some peace to my heart, but they can also rankle a bit, because it often doesn’t seem like the pain of the world is justified by the good we can actually see God bringing from it. I do appreciate the good, but my view of it is desperately limited, and at times my feelings seem to swing on my sight alone.
The Apostle Paul told us that “our light and momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17), and I believe that to be true—but the emphasis on eternal is unsettling. There are often long seasons of life where suffering doesn’t feel “light and momentary,” and I’d like to hear that the glory would be found here—and preferably now.
There’s a beautiful poem I keep coming back to that says:
Evil is only the slave of good;
Sorrow the servant of joy…
The deepest griefs and wildest fears
Have holiest ministries.
(A Song of Hope, by Josiah G. Holland.)
I keep returning to it because, like Romans 8:28, I want it to seep into my bloodstream. I want to believe it when my flea-vision keeps me industriously but uselessly attempting to examine the fibers of the rug in front of me in response to sorrow in the lives of friends or pain in my own. I want to believe it when my heart longs for answers now, and for all the good God’s doing to become obvious today. It can feel shadowy and illogical to believe a promise we can’t really verify in our lifetimes for the simple reason that our lives are all we know.
Despite all my attempts at sight and my “why” questions, I suspect I won’t find an answer here that will satisfy my own logic and wishes. I’m certainly no wiser than the long stream of believers who have historically clung to the promise that God is bringing good out of evil, but there’s some comfort in that knowledge. If there’s a whole universe of possible good that I don’t know about, then it’s okay to see only what’s in front of me and trust the Mover of all things to create a world that is very good—even if it’s far above my ability to comprehend. In fact, maybe this lack of understanding is just a glimpse into the fact that the good is, and will be, more beautiful and epically grand than we could ever imagine.
Dostoevsky once wrote, “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man; that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts...” I’ve begun to believe more definitely that, in the presence of the God who loves us enough to slog through pain and grief with us, we’ll feel every bit of that truth. All pain will be made up for, and every horrible moment here somehow made more than worth it.
The lack of our present “proof” for this truth can place us on a path of either bitterness or trust. I want to take the second path. I want to glance around at the pain of this life and then lift my eyes to Christ. I want to find my heart slowly becoming more bound to the truth that He can be trusted absolutely with our pain. I want to read Romans 8:28 for the hundredth time and believe with every bit of my heart that this promise of good being carved out of evil is rooted in the character and work of God Himself. In case fear and anxieties tempt us to doubt, Paul finished off Romans 8 by reminding us that the God who spoke the promise of verse 28 has also drawn us to Himself, and no force in existence will ever be able to separate us from His love. It’s the eternal love of our unchanging God that serves as the bedrock this promise springs from, and I can’t think of anything better for our hearts to rest in.