Me:  Howdy, Prodigal!  You look stuck and all the sand seems to be closing in on you.

 

Prodigal:  That may what it appears to you to be going on but there is something else.

 

Me:  So you are not in a bad position?

 

Prodigal:  No not at all, You see me in a hole that I cannot get our of.  Really I was buried underneath and I have just broke through to the top.  So it is not the end but just the beginning.

 

Me:  Wow, how we can focus to much on what we perceive and not what is going on spiritually.

 

Philip Yancey talks about faith when all around us seems to be in ruin in his book Disappointment With God.

 

For many of the heroes listed in Hebrews 11, they have one thing in common:  a dread time of testing like Job’s, a time when the fog descends and everything goes blank.  Torture, jeers, floggings, chains, stonings, sawings in two-Hebrews records in grim detail the trials that may befall faith-full people.

Saints become saints by somehow hanging on to the stubborn conviction that things are not as they appear, and that the unseen world is as solid and trustworthy as the visible world around them.  God deserves trust, even when it looks like the world is caving in.

 

The fog has descended.  Your time of testing is here.  You look with your eyes around you and there is nothing that will point you to encouragement.  You go to God.  You spiritual ears hear nothing but encouragement and telling you that it will all be turned around.

Now is the time to be blind.

Now is the time to hear.

Now is the time to show God your trust.

 

John 10:27  My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.

 

Jennifer Van Allen

 

www.theprodigalpig.com

www.faithincounseling.org