2017

2017 has been the most jarring year of my life. Death surrounded me as friends' parents passed, my own father gone, Christian figures leaving this world, a child I worked with weekly passed, hospitalizations, broken friendships having closure, the world not making sense, faith tested, doubts of God's goodness. How do people who suffer more or big Christian figures who've passed (Nabeel and Sproul) have such faith and fight for God's truth adamantly? Only God's grace sustained me, and as I look back I have no idea how I would go through these things again. His truths seem so foreign yet He reminds me of them daily. How could the simple fact that Jesus is God and came die for people seem so meaningless when it is all of life? Although I may not "feel" it, it is His grace and doing that I trust in the One I cannot see. 

So many lessons learned and to be learned. And I don't want life to simply be a "lesson" and thankfully it isn't. As much as I feel like God is merely testing me, He isn't. 
Dorthy Sayers says:

“For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”

Psalm 23 reminds me that God is sovereign, He loves us, He is with me.

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures.

He leads me beside still waters.

He restores my soul.

He leads me in paths of righteousness

for his name’s sake.

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I will fear no evil,

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff,

they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me

in the presence of my enemies;

you anoint my head with oil;

my cup overflows.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me

all the days of my life,

and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD

forever.

This world is short and is not our home. I need not to worry circumstances nor what I look like to people. In my doubts of God I saw myself the worse of sinners. How can I look myself above others who are struggling, doubting God, weak in their faith when I was the weakest?
I hope this post will remind me in the future of God's faithfulness and that life is still about God when all appears to have gone wrong and the world attempts to hide or ignore Him. Our Holy Almighty Loving Just God is worth it and deserves all the glory. Now to live it and believe as so...