For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
Jeremiah 29:11 ESV
God knows your trials, He knows your struggles intimately. “For I know…” He knows what’s in front of you today and He knows what we are facing as a world. He sees into your marriage and into your heart. He knows your grief and your frustration. The hard part to choke down is that He knows and He allows. God has the power to stop any challenge we face, but He often chooses to allow the trial to happen. We just want Him to stop it, but it continues. While it may not make any sense to us in the moment, we can have confidence that He has a purpose for every single moment of heartache He has allowed.
It is for those struggles, or because of those struggles that we can know He has a plan. It is in or through those trials that His plan will come to pass. It is by enduring those trials that we find the will of God.
God does not promise His plan for us will be easy, but He does promise it will be good. And the goodness of the Lord is His will for us—His will is to chasten our hearts until we are more and more like Him.
I read somewhere, “I think that it is through grief that we carve depth into our souls and create space to be filled with comfort from and for one another. And that is profoundly beautiful.” I think this perfectly captures God’s will for us. He created us to be relational beings—to love and to care for one another as deeply as He cares for us. But sin caused our hearts to turn inward, to prioritize ourselves above others. We don’t know how to love one another as God calls us to love until we have been chastened. It is only through trials that our compassion and understanding for others grow and our hearts are transformed. Without those trials, we remain focused primarily on ourselves.
Yield to the chastening, look for the transformation in the trial rather than the end. Allow Him to grow you to be more like Him. When we shift our perspective of our trials to His perspective, we can see the beauty even in our tragedies, and there we can find true joy, there we discover how to love others as He loves—that’s His plan for you.
Press on ~ you are loved 💗
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