learning how to deal

For several months now I've been praying about how to "suffer" well throughout the year, and I have felt like "suffering" was an extreme word until this morning. As I was reading through a chapter in one of Tim Keller's most recent books, the Lord began to shed light on the balance I have been wrestling with. I want to embrace the sadness/frustration/pain of separation as the current reality that they are, but I want my hope to be set so fully on Christ that it is not the overarching theme of my life. It seems to be a tension between being real and giving church answers, facing difficulty and being ok with it, living for eternity and ignoring the present altogether.

I would like to quote several portions of this chapter entitled "The Cup" from King's Cross. Keller is explaining the agony of what Jesus felt the night before He died as He asked the Father to remove the cup of wrath from Him. Jesus has just experienced the first taste of the anguish our redemption will cost him, and Keller explains His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Suffering happens, we might say, when there's a gap between the desires of your heart and the circumstances of your life, and the bigger the gap, the greater the suffering. 

Often what seem to be our deepest desires are really just our loudest desires. 

Yet not what I will, but what you will.Jesus is subordinating his loudest desires to his deepest desires by putting them in the Father's hands. As if to say, "If the circumstances of life do not satisfy the present desires of my heart, I'm not going to suppress those desires, but I'm not going to surrender to them, either. I know that they will only be satisfied, eventually, in the Father. I will trust and obey him, put myself in his hands, and go forward." 

Jesus doesn't deny his emotions, and he doesn't avoid the suffering. He loves into the suffering. In the midst of his suffering, he obeys for the love of the Father--and for the love of us.And when you see that, instead of perpetually denying your desires or changing your circumstances, you'll be able to trust the Father in your suffering. You will be able to trust that because Jesus took the cup, your deepest desires and your actual circumstances are going to keep converging until they unite forever on the day of the eternal feast. 

That love--whose obedience is wide and long high and deep enough to dissolve a mountain of rightful wrath--is the love you've been looking for all your life. No family love, no friend love, no mother love, no spousal love, no romantic love--nothing could possibly satisfy you like that. All those other kinds of loves will let you down; this one never will.

Praying to remember, reflect on, and digest this love as much as possible in the days, weeks, months to come. Grateful for the reminder and the revelation. I would highly recommend King's Cross, or any other by Tim Keller.