“God and the Lesser Pain”
There was a time when I wasn’t allowing my oldest daughter to learn to walk. My intentions may have been good. After all, I didn’t want my daughter to experience the pain of falling. We lived in a parsonage that had a hardwood floor. So, I would catch her. My daughter turned it into a game called “I-fall-backwards-and-daddy-catches-me”. The game was great fun, but there was a downside: My daughter was not learning to walk.
Finally, my wise and tough wife said to me, “She’s never going to learn to walk if you keep doing that.” She was right and I knew it.
So, the next time our daughter started to walk, I stood a few feet away. As she fell backward, I contraried my instincts and let her fall. She looked back at me with such shock and accusation that I almost thought that I had done the wrong thing. But within a few days, she was walking.
“Underneath are the everlasting arms,” said God to Moses. However, that doesn’t mean that God always catches us when we fall. Sometimes, God lets us fall. We call these “consequences”. Some of us also question God. “Why didn’t you catch me?” Actually, this is often more of an accusation than a question.
But here is the bottom line, I think: God wants us to learn to walk. A painful process? Yes! At least, the falling is. I suspect that God, because God loves us so much, finds our falls to be very painful, too. However, it will be more painful in the long run for us and for God if we don’t learn how to walk. And God will always choose the lesser pain for Himself and for us.
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