I Will Praise You FOR This Storm

As I was doing my devotional one day last week, I came across a quote from a preacher that startled me to my core. He said, "Before God can use you significantly, you must be hurt deeply." At first, I was somewhat offended by the quote, but as I meditated on it, I began to see his intentions a bit more clearly.

I have been through a few storms lately and I have been searching for understanding. This hit me so hard. Until we have experienced some sort of trial in our life that has caused us to rely 110% on God, how can we truly testify about God's love and salvation? Until we have walked completely blinded but guided by God's loving hand and grace, how can we whole-heartedly testify about the righteousness of God's path?

I have always looked back on hard times and seen countless lessons that I've learned (and there are probably countless more that I can't even see). For example, I can look back at my sister's drug use and see how that removed even the slightest temptation from my mind for ever using drugs. My mom's breast cancer scare taught me to rely completely on God, to trust His will, and to pray for His interests and not my own.

This devotional changed my thinking from, "God I will praise you through this storm" to "God I will praise you FOR this storm." And here are a few reasons why:

1. Just because I deem a situation as "bad" does not mean that God does. He uses hard times as ways of building our character, our reliance on Him, our faith in others, our faith in ourselves.

2. Adversity comes from one of two places - God or the devil. Neither should be daunting and here is why. God places obstacles before us to build us up and to teach us important lessons about Him. If you are a child of God, from my understanding, Satan must have God's permission to tempt you and God is not going allow you to be tempted beyond what He knows you can handle. The bottom line here is, whether your adversity stems from God's love or Satan's undermining, as long as you focus on God through it, you will come out of it a much better person - physically, mentally, and spiritually - than you went in.

3. We don't know the big picture. In fact, we can't even come close to attempting to understand the big picture. As long as we believe that all things good come from God, then we can know that every single moment of our lives is fundamentally important to God's big picture. If it weren't, he would not have worked so hard to make us or focussed so much attention on loving us as completely as He does.

By no means am I suggesting that we should pray for bad to happen to us. What I am suggesting is that, rather than focusing completely on the bad of a situation, we should take a moment to step back and, no matter how much pain we are in, praise God for the opportunity for growth, wisdom, and a glimpse of Him. I have found that praising God FOR the storm (remembering how much good can come from something bad) will change our perspective and help us even more to praise Him THROUGH the storm.