what I'm reading: when the earth's shoes don't fit

One of the hardest things about suffering is that it's difficult to get any perspective.

Suffering befuddles your brain. It strips away the things you once thought you knew. You can't think clearly.

In the middle of this, the Bible invites you to look at things from a new perspective - from the future. Not easy when you're swallowed up by pain!

But these words from Joni Eareckson's When God Weeps invited me to do just that. They made me smile through my tears. 

Time is slippery stuff ... When we recall pain in the past, we do so with a perspective we simply didn't have when going through it ...

When looking back on heartache, the pain fades like a hazy memory. The trauma has dulled like an old photograph. Only the results survive, the things of lasting importance ...

When we come "through the valley of the shadow of death", we are different people. Better, stronger, and wiser ...

The Bible constantly tries to get us to look at life this way. It steadfastly tries to implant the perspective of the future into our present ... It's a view that separates what is lasting from what will fall by the wayside, ... always underscoring the final results - the heart settled, the soul rejoicing. ...

Human nature gags on such a perspective. It tries to rivet you to the pain of the present, blinding you to the realities of the future. Human nature would rather lick its wounds and sneer, "That's pie in the sky. The future doesn't count."

But it does count. So much so that

everything else, no matter how real it seems to us, is treated as insubstantial, hardly world a snort ... That is why Scripture can seem at times so blithely and irritatingly out of touch with reality, brushing past huge philosophical problems and personal agony. That is just how life is when you are looking from the end. Perspective changes everything. What seemed so important at the time has no significance at all.*

The Bible blatantly tells us to "rejoice in suffering" and "welcome trials as friends" because God wants us to step into the reality he has in mind for us, the only reality that ultimately counts ... God wants his people aflame with his hope. ...

It doesn't happen without suffering. Affliction is what fuels the furnace of this heaven-hearted hope ... Suffering...turns our hearts toward the future ...

Earth's pain keeps crushing our hopes, reminding us this world can never satisfy; only heaven can. And every time we begin to nestle too comfortably on this planet, God cracks open the locks of the dam to allow an ice-cold splash of suffering to wake us from our spiritual slumber ...

Suffering keeps swelling our feet so that earth's shoes won't fit.

*Tim Stafford