It doesn’t let up. There is no relief. God doesn’t give us relief.
God doesn’t give us relief, because he wants to give us healing, which is a very different thing. We suffer from so much pain in our lives—from broken relationships, or the suffering of illness, or the injustices heaped upon us, or simply the wounds of our own sin. Most of the time, we just want that suffering to be gone. We want relief. We want to go back to the time before that relationship broke, before that illness overtook us, before we were unjustly wronged, before we failed our God.
But the Lord doesn’t want to take us back—he wants to take us forward. He wants to heal us. He wants to show us a much greater mercy and love than we might desire, we who pine after the way things once were.
It has always been this way, since the very beginning. After Adam and Eve fell from grace and were expelled from the Garden, surely they looked back with yearning, longing to return. Surely they wanted relief from the curses brought by the Tree. But the Lord had a greater plan, a plan to give them and all of humanity healing. It was a plan that would stretch over centuries and millennia, a plan that would reach its climax when he came down from heaven and became a man himself. It was a plan that would heal the suffering of the First Adam by the suffering of the Second Adam, and it is a plan that even continues until today, encompassing our own lives, and our own suffering.
The Lord’s plan to heal is filled with the infinite mercy of an infinitely loving God. But it is not simple, and not simply relief. No, God wants to walk with us down the long and arduous path to true healing. And when we arrive, we will not be the same as before. We will be better.
But for now, we take one step at a time down the difficult and yet wonderful way that God has given us, confident that our Father in heaven knows how to give good things to his children. And let us always pray for the strength to accept healing, and the wisdom to leave behind our wish for relief.
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