Voices: God’s love is with us in the floods

God loves us very much, and it takes a lifetime to understand what that means.

In my later years at age 72, I am just beginning to form a rough image of his devoted, enduring fatherhood, and his pleasure and joy in his children—in you and me personally.

How humbling it is to be loved by God and how much I have yet to learn.

In the past days, our hearts have been wrenched over deaths in the Kerrville-area floods. We are bereaved, questioning, and some of us may well be angry. We are all those messy things God wants us to bring to him as we sit at his feet or crawl onto his lap for comfort.

God is Abba, Father, Daddy to us now more than ever. There is no shame in needing him.

We Texans are proud people who like to feel in control. If we have wealth and power and all that goes with that, we may feel entitled to control our world. Then along comes a storm, and it floods the banks of what a storm should do and sweeps away people we love most.

We see we never had any control over nature, storm warnings or meteorologists, nor life nor death. We are not safe. Yet there is this: Lack of safety drives us to God and onto his lap to learn how to keep living.

We can rest in the Lord

When I had cancer five years ago, and the cancer had spread a bit, I learned to lie on my bed and visualize God holding me. His warm presence seemed to cover me, and I learned to relax my tense muscles and breathe deeper and more normally, sometimes falling into needed sleep.

I could do this because I knew God wanted to comfort me as a parent, that he waited patiently for me simply to accept his care, to seek him with my whole heart.

From Scripture, I knew he would hide and shelter me in battle and preserve my life. He perhaps would sing over me and hold my tears and prayers in his bottle. I knew to come boldly to him for help, and that he was suffering with me.

It is God’s glory, his desire and joy, to comfort all who come to him in faith. We do not have to be ashamed of needing him. For when we are weak, we are strong because we depend on him.

That too is his glory, just as depending on him is our healing. All this works together as God works in all things for good, according to his eternal plan.

It is OK to ask questions

Still, God knows we have questions. Yes, answers are in the Bible, but not everyone can easily pull together all the verses that talk about free will, sin and choice that explain the fall of man.

It is important to mention in the wake of the Kerr County flooding, all creation—nature, the cosmos—presently is in bondage to sin and will rage on, bringing disaster and death until the Father brings all things to conclusion under his authority and creates the new heaven and earth.

God both is permitting natural disaster and at the same time protectively holding on to his children. That is a tension we must live with temporarily in our human vulnerability.

While his intervention in the physical world may seem limited, his intervention in our spiritual well-being is as limitless as heaven and eternity.

When we are suffering, it helps to remember:

• Suffering will not last forever.
• We do not suffer alone. We suffer in fellowship with Jesus and fellow believers.
• The Spirit intercedes for us, crying out to the Father, even if we have no words and cannot pray.
• We do not suffer without hope if we are believers. Jesus has prepared a place for us and our loved ones, and he personally will bring us to that dwelling place. Separation from loved ones is temporary.

Our present suffering is nothing compared to the glory to come.

Suffering and the work of God in his people

Recently, I read about how the people of God, the church, moves forward.

Don’t we move forward when people turn to God, when they humble themselves and seek the face of God, when they band together and help each other and the lost? Don’t we move forward in times of suffering?

God does not cause or send our suffering, but he does work in our suffering to make us like Christ. We can become ambassadors for Christ when we move out of our pain to join Jesus in his work of healing hurts.

God will complete what he began

We may see God dimly now, like a preliminary outline of all he is, but he is the designer who draws the big picture. He has the master plan. He holds the pieces of our lives and will fit them together.

We can trust him in suffering. He is completely faithful to complete every work he began, and he will complete it with great love and healing.

Ruth Cook is a longtime Texas Baptist. The views expressed in this opinion article are those of the author.