One of my friends is the hottest blonde you can possibly imagine. Wait. That didn’t sound right, at all. Everybody stop imagining. Let me start over. Ahem.
I have a friend who is just so naturally stunning, and “fearfully and wonderfully made.” She’s the Barbie I wanted to be when I was little and used to think real women like my mom were blonde. And as a descriptor, she's the weight I can’t possibly be now that…I’m not little. She’s the healthy mother of a healthy boy and looks like she can’t possibly have birthed a child from her body. Anyhow, she’s blue-eyed gorgeousness on steroids. But there’s something else about her that makes me know she’s real beauty itself…
Not long ago and late at night, she told me a story. My hands were sunk into dishwater up to my elbows, and she leaned on the counter across the bar from me. Her lovely face was illuminated by the tealights nested in a long row on the countertop, their little flames bouncing joyfully in painful contrast. I pen “painful contrast” because her story breaks my heart. How could it be possible?
No tears fell from her eyes, no despondent sighs escaped her lips, just heart-rending, factual accounts followed one after the other of late events. Wiping her hand across the counter to brush an imaginary something away, she paused. “Johanna, is something the matter with me? Why do I give up these things so easily? You know I’m strong. Am I getting a double personality or something horrible like that because I can walk through this without going nuts? I’m going to go to counseling because I’m not scared, because I’m not crying.”
I reached for the dish towel to dry my eyes and hands. (Not a habit or anything to use the dish cloth, you know, just for the record.) The truth was obvious to me. “It might be a good question to consider, but the fact is, people who are not normal, don’t have normal responses. The closer you are to God, the less likely you are to respond how everyone thinks is ‘right’ or ‘healthy,’ even. It’s not some abstract thing, either: I can see that.”
Joseph Caryl wrote, “God takes the most eminent and choicest of His servants for the choicest and most eminent afflictions. They who have received most grace from God are able to bear most afflictions from God. Affliction does not hit the saint by chance, but by direction. God does not draw His bow at a venture. Every one of His arrows goes upon a special errand and touches no breast but his against whom it is sent. It is not only the grace, but the glory of a believer when he can stand and take affliction quietly.” Oh. Wow. Read that again…
“Taking affliction quietly” sounds—very unrealistic. But, Christian reader, it is our glory. It is our chance to direct attention back on God. It is our chance to become Christlike. It is our chance to mature, to grown in wisdom, to prove how real God is in real life, to become truly beautiful from the inside, out. Why would we actually want to skip a chance like that?
Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened unto you:
But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.
If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you: on their part he is evil spoken of, but on your part he is glorified.
But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or as a thief, or as an evildoer, or as a busybody in other men’s matters.
Yet if any man suffer as a Christian, let him not be ashamed; but let him glorify God on this behalf.
I Peter 4:12-16
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