I have a scar on my right hand from a job I worked in my twenties. I will not bore you with the details, but the short version is that I did something careless, something sharp moved faster than I expected, and the rest is biology. What I remember most is not the moment it happened. It is the weeks after, when the wound was closing but not closed, when it itched in a way that made you want to crawl out of your skin, and when the doctor told me that the itching was the tissue knitting itself back together.
The discomfort was the healing.
I have thought about that a lot over the years, because it is a remarkably accurate picture of what God does with suffering and our times of waiting.
Paul does not tiptoe around this. We also exult in our tribulations, knowing that tribulation brings about perseverance, and perseverance, proven character, and proven character, hope (Romans 5:3-4).
Read that slowly, because it is easy to skim past what Paul is actually claiming. He is not saying suffering is fine because it will be over eventually. He is saying suffering produces something. Actively. Right now. In you. The tribulation is not an interruption to your growth. It is the means of it. The gap is where God does His best work.
That is not how we usually feel about the hard seasons. We forget that tribulation produces perseverance.
We feel like we are falling behind. Like everyone else is moving and we are stuck. Like God has either forgotten where He put us or decided we can handle more than we actually can. The gap between where we are and where we thought we would be by now can feel less like a workshop and more like a waiting room with no magazines and no news on when your name will be called.
But here is what Scripture will not let us do. It will not let us call that gap wasted time.
Hebrews 12 puts it plainly. Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith(Hebrews 12:1-2).
Two things in that passage that are worth sitting with. First, the race is set before us — not chosen by us, not designed to our preferences, not adjusted for our comfort level. It is set. Second, endurance is not something you summon from inside yourself. You run it with your eyes fixed on Someone outside yourself. The moment you look away from Him and start measuring the distance you have left, the legs go.
Perseverance, in Scripture, is not optimism. It is not telling yourself it will get better and pressing on with clenched teeth. It is obedience in the dark. It is continuing to do the next right thing when you cannot see what it is producing, because you trust the One who can.
James says it this way. Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing (James 1:2-4).
Perfect and complete. That is the finish line. Not comfortable. Not unscathed. Complete.
The gap between who you are and who God is making you is not evidence that something has gone wrong. It is evidence that something is still going on. The wound is still closing. The tissue is still knitting. The discomfort you are feeling right now may be exactly that — the feeling of becoming.
I will not tell you the hard season you are in is easy, or that it is short, or that you will understand it on this side of eternity. I cannot promise any of those things, and I would not insult you by trying.
What I can tell you is what Scripture says. That it is not random. That God wastes nothing. That the same Jesus who is the author of your faith is also its perfecter, and He does not start things He does not intend to finish. Tribulation produces perseverance
Keep going. Not because you can see the end. Because He can.
Be blessed,
Kevin
Tim Challies – we’re not affiliated but you might enjoy his writing
Some thoughts on finding a good church
Live in Abbotsford? There are many good churches. This is where I attend.
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