Third Dimension of Discipline

Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. Heb 12:7

I am only now waking out of a nightmare of a monstrous business debt that chased me for eighteen years. It is strange how differently things of the night look by morning light. I feel silly about how terrified I was and how much sleep I lost. Walk with me around a few of my supposed terrors.

See those pointed thorns in my side? In the dark, I thought they were meant to gore me. I see now they were handles God used to pick me up. And those shards of shattered trust in others, I was sure they were for tearing bloody gashes in my heart. Here in the daylight they are only arrows pointing to God. And see there where I was standing? In the darkness of night, I concluded my destination lay behind some hidden exit. All the while, I was standing smack in the middle of my destination. Clinging to the Savior during trials is a destination. It is all very innocent looking in the sunshine. I now laugh and say with the Psalmist, “It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees” (Ps 119:71).

God exploits the evil in my life for His own good purposes; in fact, that is one of His specialties. He grabs hold of the lining of my suffering and turns it inside out to reveal beauty that I will carry into paradise. In my two-dimensional thinking, I saw life events as either black or white squares. All the black squares resulted from sin while the white squares were good things from God. What I failed to perceive was the third dimension where the squares reach back into cubes. After I or someone else colored the surface of a square black, God came along and backfilled the cube with pure luminescent white. After the error, God poured behind it deep-reaching eternal lessons such as humility, patience, empathy, dependence, and prioritization. Life is not about what is on the surface but what happens in the depth of our spirit.

Prayer: Father, I am glad you love me enough to let me learn through pain.