Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
I want to share a quote from page 22 of Crabbs’s book
“Depending on an unresponsive God in the middle of crumbling dreams can be tough on faith. Relating personally with a God who is less responsive than friends with far fewer resources is difficult.
Exactly what is God doing with all his power? At some point in your Christian life you’ll be forced to admit that Jesus didn’t make it on your list of responsive, valued friends. Live long enough, and dreams important to you will shatter. Some will remain shattered. God will not glue together the pieces of ever Humpty Dumpty who takes a great fall in your life.
The divorce will go through, the cancer will claim a loved one’s life, the Alzheimer’s will not be arrested (let alone reversed) by the latest drug. The broken friendship will not be restored despite your best efforts to reconcile. Your marriage will not be satisfying no matter how many counselors your consult or seminars you attend. Your singleness will be an intolerable burden. The budding ministry will never materialize. The lost income will not be replaced by money pouring out of heaven’s windows.
You’ll feel low for a long time; the dark tunnel will lengthen with no light visible at its end. Your sense of adventure will yield to dutiful drudgery. You will be miserable. Your dream of feeling alive, captivated by beauty and passionately free, will die.
Lesson 6 ~ The past is irreparable; the future is always available. In every case, when good dreams shatter, better ones are there to newly value and pursue. These better dreams are indestructible; they will not be taken away from us either by God (because He is good) or by the forces of hell (because evil has no power to thwart God’s highest purposes). The sixth lesson – no matter what happens in life, a wonderful dream is available, always, that if pursued will generate an unfamiliar, radically new internal experience. That experience, strange at first, will eventually be recognized as joy.
Lesson 5 ~ Most people never discover true life. Unbelievers don’t possess it. Believer’s, all of them, do possess it, but not many experience it. The fifth lesson – Not many Christians drink deeply from the well of living water. As a result, our worship, our community and our witness are weak.
Lesson 4 ~ A child always given candy never learns to like vegetables. A student never required to read Shakespeare or to listen to Beethover never develops a taste for more than sensational fiction and noisy music. Similarly, when lesser dreams reliably come true, we have a hard time appreciating greater dreams. We neither envision them nor pursue them. The fourth lesson – Only an experience of deep pain develops our capacity for recognizing and enjoying true life.
Lesson 3 ~ Some cherished dreams will crumble in your life. That’s inevitable. It happens to all of us before we’re through living down here. No one makes it unscathed to the end. Whether we believe that God cause the trial (as Naomi did) or that God merely allowed the trial, one thing is clear: He could have prevented the trial. he could have given us a good time, at least a better time than we had. The fact creates within us a tension with God. The third lesson – Some dreams important to us will shatter, and the realization that God could have fulfilled that dream pushes us into a terrible battle with him.
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