God's Wooden Spoon | Previous Challenge Entry

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TITLE: God's Wooden Spoon | Previous Challenge Entry
By James Barringer
01/11/10
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I was a boy once upon a time; you can tell because I still act like one on a pretty regular basis. I would even say I was a quintessential boy, too. I was active and curious and loved dirt and, if there was some way I could get in trouble, I would find it in world record time.

Because of this, I spent much of my childhood bent over while my mom went to fetch the wooden spoon, with which she would attempt to bludgeon some sense into my hindquarters. The thing that confused me is that mom would frequently say, “This hurts me more than it hurts you!” Really, mom? Cause we can switch places if you want.

Hebrews 12 tells us that we should be happy when God disciplines us, because that means he cares enough about us that he’s willing to spend his time and energy correcting us. He has the whole galaxy at his fingertips, but instead of going off to play with a distant nebula, he would rather help me become a better person.

There are two problems. The first and most obvious is that it’s very difficult to simultaneously endure correction and be thankful for it, because the whole point of correction is that it’s painful. The Israelites wandered away from God and were sold wholesale into slavery after a brutal siege of Jerusalem, during which food was so scarce that mothers ate their own babies (see Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations). As if that wasn’t enough, God then criticizes them for lamenting their captivity – “I don’t know why you think I’m going to hear your laments, because this is exactly what I told you would happen if you didn’t turn back to me” (paraphrase of Zechariah 7:5-7). Ow. Just plain ow.

The second is that it’s sometimes hard to know whether the painful thing is happening as a result of God’s correction, or for some other reason. We see this in the example of Job. Job was a righteous man, completely blameless, yet he still lost everything he had. His friends, helpful souls that they were, kept insisting that he must have done something wrong, that he must be experiencing God’s correction or judgment for sin. God himself appears later in the story and explains that this isn’t the case.

If we were not Christians, this issue of “ow” would cause no problems for us. We could simply say that pain is a part of life and that we just have to deal with it and move on. But since we are Christians, we understand that everything in life serves a higher purpose, because it comes from the hand of God. When I’m going through a period of “ow,” the worst thing I can possibly do is focus on the ow itself. In the big picture of things, whether it comes from God for my correction or for some other purpose, the point is that it comes from God.

The best way, the only Christian way, to get through the ow is to look back to its source. “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” Job asks rhetorically (2:10). How arrogant of us to expect a life free from pain, to assume that God has some explaining to do if he allows us to experience it. What a selfish and small mindset that is. Surely God is to be praised because he is God, because he is a holy and mighty creator, not merely because of how happy he makes me. He continues to be God even when I’m experiencing ow, and the best way to handle the ow – which is temporary – is to focus on what is eternal. If it is for correction or for something else, God will make that known in time.

Paul believed that our faith should affect how we see pain. In 1 Thessalonians 4:13, he writes (slightly paraphrased), “When a loved one dies, I don’t want you to grieve like the nonbelievers, the ones who don’t have any hope.” Hope should change the way we see pain. The ow is there – Paul is not saying to pretend they feel no pain – but the hope should be bigger than the ow, because God is bigger than the ow. Jesus adds, “In this world you will have trouble, but take heart: I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Ow has nothing on the power of a risen messiah.

I gotta go. Mom's coming with the wooden spoon again.

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