Have you ever read something that you disagreed with to the core of your being, and it made you mad? Recently, I read someone’s thoughts about my God and the death a beloved man in our community. Anger was the emotion driving her words questioning how a good God could allow such a horrific tragedy of an unwanted death to a good man.
Why does God allow the difficult things in life? I think the sovereign, good God I believe, trust, and serve allows hard things, a lot of times we do not understand, because he cares about the lost.
My grandmother, who I loved, wore a dinner ring on her right hand. As a little girl, I used to twirl the ring around her finger with my hands. The ring is stunning, but its beauty pales in comparison to the heart of my grandmother. My sister and I always knew that when Gran left this earth to be with our Lord and Savior, her wedding band would go to my sister and her dinner ring would go to me. Gran passed away when I was in college. I wear her dinner ring with great affection for her – a woman who lived out godliness, strength, and southern etiquette.
Four months ago, my grandmother’s ring was stolen from my home. I do not wear the ring everyday (rarely do I wear jewelry), so it took me two weeks before I noticed the ring was missing. I remembered seeing the ring on a Sunday and noticed it was missing two Fridays later when I wanted to wear it. When I realized the ring was gone, I felt sick to my stomach. At the time, I did not know the ring was taken. I retraced two weeks of my life going through every trash can and bag in our house and garage, shifting through vacuum bags, repetitively asking the boys if they used the ring as a treasure when they were playing Legos, and looking through each Lego crate. I even looked at the video footage of the school where I teach just to see if I had worn the ring to school during that time. I also prayed. Yes, I prayed for a piece of jewelry to be found.
As my sweet prayer partner reminded me (when I felt silly for asking her to pray with me that the ring be found) –
God is the God of lost things.
Her comment made me think of the three parables in Luke 15. Each one about lost things. Jesus tells three parables about a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son. To find the one lost sheep, the shepherd leaves ninety-nine. To find one of her silver coins, the woman in Luke 15 turns her house upside down. To reunite with his lost son, the father in Luke 15 waits until his son comes to his senses. At the end of each parable, there is rejoicing over what was lost being found. The shepherd and the woman both gather their friends and neighbors together to rejoice with them. The father of the wayward son throws a feast to celebrate his son’s return. Why is there celebration in each parable? Jesus says in Luke 15:10, “There is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” Each parable represents a lost soul, dead in sin, who finds life by repenting and coming alive to the gospel.
God is God of the lost. He pursues the lost (even through measures we do not understand) because he cares about redeeming the sin that we brought into this world. God’s heart for the lost makes me think of the Abrahamic covenant. God, not Abraham, walked through the bloody, halved animals to declare to Abraham – May this happen to me if I do not hold up my end of our covenant (which cannot happen because I’m a God of my word) or if you do not hold up your end of our covenant (which you and your children will do time and time again). I’ll bleed out for you just like these animals if you break our covenant.
And he did. Through the person of Christ, God fixed what our sin broke by bleeding out for us on the cross. Why? Because he cares for the lost. And I think he uses events we cannot even begin to understand for the sake of the lost.
Three months after not being able to find my grandmother’s ring, I filed a police report. A detective was assigned to the case of my missing ring. For one month, the detective persistently checked pawn shops and reports of theft. The detective, who had a picture of the ring, would call and update me periodically. One day in August, the detective called to say that he thought he had found my ring, but it was shipped off by a pawn shop for cleaning because after a three month hold, the shop was going to put it on the sales floor. The detective said there was no way to intercept the cleaning of the ring. We would need to wait until the pawn shop got the ring back to confirm whether or not it was my ring. The last day in August, the detective called again and said – I have your ring. It was the one sent off to be cleaned.
I screamed with excitement. My lost ring was found! My ring that was stolen, pawned, lost for four months, and shipped off for cleaning was returned to my home and back in my possession. The boys wanted to have a celebratory dinner at my favorite restaurant, and so we did.
Now, when I look at my grandmother’s dinner ring, I am not only reminded of her love, I am reminded of Luke 15 and my Father’s love for the lost.
After the funeral of the beloved man in our community, I called a girl I discipled for seven years, during her middle school and high school years. She knew the man who had passed away. He was one of her teachers. Like him, she is a believer who was diagnosed with cancer, yet she is a cancer survivor. In five years, she has fought cancer twice, had a bone marrow transplant, and has survived. I called my sweet Natalie after the funeral to say – I don’t know why God calls some of his children home and leaves others on this earth, but I believe it is because his concern is for the lost. He wants you to keep reaching the lost through your life here on earth just as your teacher did through his life and death.
So why I think the sovereign, good God I believe, trust, and serve allows what we do not understand is because he cares about the lost. He sees the big picture of redemption, and since he is the one who made redemption possible, I will trust him with the process.