On weekdays during Advent we are posting the daily reflection from our Abundance Advent booklet here on our blog. You can download the booklet in its entirety here.
“For if, one man’s sin caused death to rule over all people because of that man. How much more, then, will those people who accept and receive the abundance of God’s full grace and the great gift of being made right with him, have true life and reign in the future life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Just as death ruled in Adam, so believers rule over death through Christ.”
Romans 5:17
In the darkest night of our soul, we have something incredibly abundant to hold on to. We know Christ crucified. As Christians, even when there seems to be no other evidence of God’s love, we cannot escape the abundance of the cross—Christ’s incredibly abundant love for us: His dying in our place and rising from the dead that we might truly know God and His abundant love and grace that is free for us to receive and hold victoriously onto in the darkest of times.
We like to ignore death. We often avoid pain and suffering, even that of others, at all costs. To look death in the eye and view our suffering or the suffering of others with empathy is to view a mirror of our brokenness; to acknowledge our own inferiority and frailty; to recognize with humility that we are finite, we are not in control, and we are not God.
This year I looked death in the eye. The truth I received when I was willing to look was more abundant than I expected. I was suffering from a mysterious, excruciating, and debilitating neuropathic pain. After nine surgeries and an electrical device implanted into the fluid around my spinal cord and hip to improve my quality of life, my condition worsened and I could barely get out of bed without vomiting from the pain. My doctors regretfully informed me there was nothing more they could do for me. The doctors couldn’t locate the source of my pain and my condition would be upgraded to “intractable pain disease.” They explained this meant that my severe constant pain could not be cured by any means known to man, I would be bed-bound on strong pain meds, and I would die an early death, as my bodily organs would start shutting down in response to the severe constant pain.
On the one hand, this was devastating news. I grieved this news so deep it often felt like a cement block was on my chest. I often sobbed privately in the shower or on the bedroom floor, the kind of sob where the agony is so deep and guttural your mouth-open sobs are without sound. All I could focus on was that my life was over and unfulfilled. I was 32 years old, unmarried, and without kids. I’d done everything I ever wanted to do, except these, and yet all I could see was that I would never get married; I would likely never get out of bed; I would never have children or buy a home—things I had watched my friends do two or even three times.
On the other hand, I welcomed death and freedom from this excruciating pain. These circumstances seemed so unfair. What did I do to deserve a slow, excruciatingly painful death at a young age? Why did I have to suffer this alone and unmarried? I demanded God’s promises, and yet they remained unfulfilled. Maybe you’ve never experienced this particular devastating suffering, but maybe you can relate. What promise has gone unfulfilled in your life so far? Marriage? Pregnancy? Healing? A particular promotion or position? Death or salvation for a loved one?
One afternoon after my second neurosurgery, I sobbed as my mother helped me bathe and dry my hair. I grieved that my body, once beautiful, was now marred with 15 inches of scars, and I was too weak to care for myself. I was broken, and I admitted to God that I couldn’t do this life any longer. With humility I saw myself in the mirror—He was God and I was not. I was not in control of my life, and this pain was too much to bear alone. God spoke words of truth to me in that moment that changed my perspective and unexpectedly brought joy amidst the suffering. He posed a series of questions back to me. “What did I already do for you? If I was willing to suffer undeservedly in your place, can you trust me to show you my purposes? Can you praise what I’ve already done regardless of what you see and feel right now?”
In this life there will be suffering. What’s perplexing is not that we will encounter suffering, it’s that Christ suffered in our place. Why did Christ, the innocent one, suffer in our place for our sins? When we look at Christ crucified and raised from the dead, we can rejoice, knowing the Lord’s strength and abundant love is ours to receive. Because of His abundant love for us in dying on the cross and in His raising from the dead, we can know that the most serious issue and conflict in our lives has already been overcome. Because of His grace and mercy, we will always have a reason to rejoice at our abundance. To find abundance and true joy in the midst of suffering is to recognize that, in this life, our suffering is never as great or as serious as our sins. Regardless of the severity of suffering we experience in life, it will always be less than what we have deserved for our sins.
God questioned me further. “If I relieved your suffering or answered your unfulfilled expectations, what would you do with your life? How would you respond? Would your life be less about you, and more about what I did for
you—more about sharing with joy the abundant love you received from me with others?” For me it was clear, I needed to give back to Wilmington through Urban Promise to children that weren’t fortunate enough to have parents lovingly looking after them 32 years later. It would take all my energy to get there, but that transformation in perspective gave me an abundance of joy to share life and hope with my mentee, despite my pain and circumstances. I also have found renewed hope, as a third neurosurgery I had this summer in Chicago found a deeply hidden benign tumor growing on a severed nerve. Its removal has significantly relieved my pain. While God doesn’t promise I am healed, and I am admittedly trying not to get my hopes up because the doctors could not guarantee this procedure would be a permanent fix, He does promise abundance.
In this life we’ll face difficult terrain and overwhelming obstacles, but those mountains of circumstances can be transformed into opportunities to experience an abundance of God’s love, and strength to persevere and to prevail by grace—as we humbly pray, as we humbly wait, and as we humbly rejoice. We can pray for God’s glory and not our own, for His purposes to be made known; we can appeal to Him to be glorified in and through our trial instead of complaining and demanding relief. And with this change of perspective toward humility and praising Christ’s glory and not focusing on our brokenness, we can find abundance—a supernatural abundance of joy, love, grace, mercy, contentment, fulfillment, hope, peace, kindness, and goodness we can’t help but generously share with others.
An Advent prayer: God, you alone are God and I am not. Thank you for sending your son Jesus to die for my sins and to overcome death—to do for me what I could not do for myself. Forgive me my sins and trespasses against You. Forgive me for not empathizing with the suffering of others and for focusing on myself and my unfulfilled expectations and not on the joy of my salvation. Thank you for your mercy in not giving me what I deserved and for your grace in giving me the free gift of eternal life that I didn’t deserve. Show me how to find abundance amidst my brokenness. Bring my soul deep contentment and joy, regardless of the circumstances. Transform my heart to humbly praise You for who You are and what You first did for me. Compel me to generously share the abundance of love I’ve received from you with others, that Your word, good purposes, love, and grace would be perfected through and demonstrated in my brokenness.
“For in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part.”
2 Corinthians 8:2