Knowing God's Will In your Despair (ePub)

Life gives us many opportunities to give up on what we believe to be true. When events happen in our life that challenges the truth of our system of beliefs, we feel pain. We do not think our spouse should divorce us, that our kids should use drugs, or that our loved ones should suffer. These types of events may cause us to conclude, "Life is not supposed to be like this." We may even assume that somehow God has let us down. In any case, we want the pain to go away.

We only have a few options to lessen the pain. We can change the rules of our values system, we can abandon it and adopt a new value system, or we can investigate our value system to see if we possibly misunderstood its rules. The choice you make will not change the circumstances that are causing you pain. The choice will simply help you to reinterpret the pain.

This is why people who are against drunkenness become drunks. They change the rules. It is why Christians become non-believers. They abandon their faith. The intent of this book is for you to choose the third option and investigate your knowledge about the rules of Christianity, to see if you are correct in your assumptions about God.

Your best option is to reinterpret your pain rather than try to make it go away, because it may never leave.

When I told a friend of mine that the theme of this book is to reinterpret your pain, he replied, "Who would want to read a book like that?" My response was "Anyone who needs hope."