When Things Don’t Go As Planned

Many of you who have followed this blog since it’s beginning remember my dude Alex from his previous knock-out contribution. You can find it down further on the page if you want to go back and read it! He is someone so near to my heart as a little brother. I know his story well and I know this past year has been one of great learning moments and I thought of no more fitting way to process out some of those emotions than to share with us his heart and some of what he has learned along the way. I pray you all are as encouraged by these spirit-led words as I have been. – BMT

Ted loves spaceships. Especially the ones made out of empty Amazon boxes.

Ted is a kid, of course (but I won’t judge if you like Amazon-box-spaceships too). One day, Ted’s mom noticed that his Amazon box spaceship was kicking the bucket. It was a mess. It was ugly. It was falling apart.

But Ted loved that spaceship. Who was she to say his spaceship was falling apart? It was his spaceship! Like any reasonable kid would do in such a situation, he kicked and screamed and cried. My uncle and I were at Ted’s house remodeling the bathroom, so I witnessed this debacle firsthand. My uncle tried consoling him, getting down on one knee and looking him in the eyes, man to boy: “Ted, soon you’ll get more boxes in the mail, stronger boxes you can use to make bigger spaceships!”

For a second it looked like this was healing Ted’s broken heart. But Ted wouldn’t have any of it.
As I watched it all unfold, I thought to myself, “doesn’t he understand he’s going to get a way bigger, way cooler spaceship soon? If he knew that, he wouldn’t be crying so much.”

As I thought that, I must have forgotten my own life these past few months.

These Past Few Months

They’ve been tough, to say the least. It wasn’t the worst of times, but it certainly wasn’t the best of them.

Early in 2020 I was accepted into one of my favorite seminaries. My plan was to go, but after having many helpful conversations, I realized I should wait another year to save some more money. These conversations took place about a week before classes started. Yikes.

So I didn’t go. I had just moved from Utica, where I left behind an incredible church. I didn’t make it to Minneapolis, where the seminary is located.I was stuck in between. I was in Rochester. I have family here, I have friends here, and for that I am actually very thankful. But it wasn’t what I planned for.

I started to question God.

God, what am I doing here? This was not what I expected. I thought I was moving forward in life. I had plans, I had goals, and now I’m back to square one. Not even square one; I’m at

square negative three! I don’t know any churches in the area, and if I finally find one, it’ll take months just to get to know people.

My plans were derailed. I was embarrassed to make the calls and texts letting people know I’m not actually going to seminary this year. As I reached out to friends and mentors, explaining to them my situation, I would give the details and then *almost* say to them, “Well, God is good. I’m just trusting Him through this.” It was on the tip of my tongue, I swear.

But I couldn’t say it. I knew I didn’t actually believe it in the moment. I caught myself. Those were clichés. They were tropes. That’s what you’re trained to say in Christianity 101.

If all we ever said was what we were trained to say, rather than taking a second to be honest, we would go to Jesus with our suffering son and declare, “Lord I believe… yeah… I believe… that’s all… no unbelief here” all while blushing and avoiding eye contact with Him.

If God wanted us to pretend everything is okay, we wouldn’t have Psalms like Psalm 13: “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”

There are no Psalm 13 Hallmark cards. I checked.

But I digress. Instead of reciting the lines, I asked people to pray for me, that I would start trusting God.

About a month later I dealt with a lot of pain in family relationships, an experience that was far worse on me than the decision to put off seminary. I won’t share too many details on the family situation. Actually I won’t share any. The point is, it was very hurtful/confusing/difficult/not fun.
I also got COVID. Blegh. COVID is no joke. By God’s grace I’m better, but it was pretty brutal.

I hesitate to share this, not because I want to keep it private, but I’ve wondered, “Should I even share what’s happened? People have experienced much worse than this.” And that is true. I know many of you have experienced much worse. I am truly thankful that this is all I’ve had to deal with these past few months. But that doesn’t mean it was easy.

My Distorted God

When life isn’t easy, two things are often true at the same time for the Christian:

1. We know the truth

2. We doubt the truth.

We hurt. Life is painful.

Sometimes I have a hard time trusting God when things don’t go my way. Why? In those moments, I trust God as long as He obeys the ten commandments. No no, not those Ten Commandments. I mean my ten commandments:

1. No tragedies
2. No pain
3. No embarrassments
4. No struggles
5. No failures
6. No surprises
7. No discomfort
8. No trials
9. No suffering
10. I’ll allow “setbacks” and “detours”, as long as we’re still headed in the direction of my expectations.

Of course, I would never admit that these are my ten commandments. But sometimes, when I face trials, I start to wonder if these are the commandments that come on my default “sinner” setting.

“You’re a Christian, aren’t you?”, you ask. “What kind of faith is that?” Well, it’s conditional. (And this doesn’t surprise God. It’s why He sent His Son to die for us after all.) The condition usually goes as follows: “I will serve and love you God. But, in return, You must give me a pain-free, sickness-free, death-free, all around inconvenience-free life. So what do you say, do we have a deal?”

When we (I’m included in this), like dogs, return to such vomity commandments, such fleshly requirements, we begin to expect things of God that He never promised us in this life. What has He promised? He has promised a city. A hope. Peace. Communion with Himself. Suffering in this life. Eternal life.

He has not promised to give us everything we want, or to do things our way, or to wrap us in bubble wrap (I speak metaphorically. Otherwise that would be fun).

What happens to my view of God when things don’t go my way? Those conveniently placed curtains called “Comfort” and “Ease” are lifted, and I have no choice but to see my real view of God, the view I’ve been hiding.

There it is. I can see it in all its ugliness. “Oh… that’s what I think of God? Can someone shut those curtains now please?”. I thought my view of God was pretty great! I read my Bible after all! I even study theology! Well, turns out I can have a pretty broken view of God sometimes. What did I expect? Everything in me is affected by sin, including how I think of God.

In the last chapter of his magnificent Lectures to My Students, Charles Spurgeon recounts the story of the 17th century Jesuits who denied the fact that Jupiter has four moons. They couldn’t believe such a scandalous claim that it had as many as four moons. (Today we know it has at least seventy-nine moons, but today is a different day).

Why did they deny this? I don’t know, but they were adamant that it doesn’t have four moons. So adamant that they refused to look into the telescope being offered them by Johannes Kepler himself, astronomer extraordinaire.

Suffering can be like a telescope God uses to zoom in on my idolatry, my conditional faith, the standards I impose on Him, the box I try fitting Him into. He zooms in with such clarity and intensity, at a level which He doesn’t do as often in times of ease.

Be it a curtain, a telescope, or what have you—suffering reveals a lot.

The Real God

So what is God really like in times of conflict anyways?

No one likes conflict. Well… most people don’t like conflict. Surely you don’t like conflict. And
yet, we love conflict in our movies and our books.

Imagine Batman without the Joker.
Imagine Harry Potter without Voldemort.

Imagine Luke Skywalker without Darth Vader.

Yeah, we like conflict.

What would those characters do for an hour and a half? For 300 pages? Just stand around and talk about the weather? I don’t know.

God is the great Storyteller. He is the grand Poet.

I don’t want any bad things in my story, but He does. That’s what the Bible says. He writes the end from the beginning (Isaiah 46:10, 45:7). That includes the middle.

Any good author knows that a good story has good conflict. But why has God written conflict into His story? For kicks? Because He’s a malevolent dictator? To top the New York Times bestsellers list?

Well, no.

Bad things give birth to great things because bad things are not in control. God is. And He’s great. Really great. This is how God works. The devil may be devilish, but as Martin Luther said, “Even the Devil is God’s Devil.” God has Satan on a leash. All the evil Satan musters up has

already been written in God’s good story.

The Devil can only do with evil intentions what God wrote in the story beforehand with gloriously good intentions.

How can I say this? Does this sound blasphemous?

Joseph says it too. He reminds his brothers (those guys who sold him into slavery), “you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20)

Peter says it too. He rebukes the Jewish people in his Pentecost sermon: “This Jesus, delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.” (Acts 2:23)

Do you see what Peter is saying? Satan’s greatest victory w as also His most crushing defeat. The most heinous act of wickedness ever committed was written beforehand by God in His thrilling tale of redemption. The baddest bad brought about the greatest good. The serpent bit the foot. He thought he got one over on the Messiah. But the Messiah crushed his head. “Take your best shot, right on the heel. You’ll never guess what happens next.”

When we look at the cross and see God paint beautiful resurrection color over a dark and gray Golgotha, we can have confidence knowing that all the wrongs in this life will be made right. When Jesus comes again, suffering will become only a memory. Death will be dead. Tears will be dried up in the radiant beams of the Son.

This is why, in Psalm 13, David moves so quickly from his “not on my Hallmark card” questioning of God, to:

But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord’s praise,
for he has been good to me.

This is the same Psalm in which David said, only four verses earlier, “Will you forget me forever?”
David brought his questions to God because he knew God wouldn’t stop loving him for asking. He knew God wanted him to reveal the innermost parts of his sinner’s heart. He knew that this God, though strangely strong enough to stop his suffering, was far too loving to be letting it happen for no reason.

This good God has a good plan. So I will praise Him, even when I don’t understand it.

Naturally this leads us to the following conclusion: of course Ted didn’t understand he was getting a bigger spaceship. He did understand. But he didn’t. Yeah he knew theoretically sometime in the future things would get better, but the moment his mom threw away his spaceship, all he knew was that his life had just been turned upside down.

You and I aren’t much different. It’s so easy to lose sight of the “better” God has in store for us. It’s so easy to assume God lost control of the wheel when things didn’t go as planned. And yet, even when we don’t understand His plan, He makes room for our questions and doubts. He still gets on His knees and comforts us. He isn’t a Hallmark card God, and we aren’t Buddhists. We Christians have room in our theology for suffering.

We don’t avoid it at all costs, or deny its there, or hopelessly fear it. We look at Jesus while we’re in it.

What do we do when life doesn’t go as planned? We shout our questions out to God, maybe even scream them. We wait on the Lord. Selah. And finally, we praise Him.

Jesus, You are the great Storyteller. You’re the One Who writes my story. Lord, swat my hand away when I try grabbing the pen; don’t let me lean on my own understanding. Give me sense when I want to be the Word made flesh; when I want to tell Your story for You.

When all is said and done, God writes my story, and He’s a better writer than me am.