My Circumstances - My Platform
The ache in my chest refused to break. The grey skies matched my mood. Our sixteen-year-old son Mark's fatal car accident was a faint memory for most people but for the past three years I started every morning with the headline, "Mark is gone. He's never coming back." Though good days popped up once in a while, this was not one of them. Calling a faithful friend seemed fruitless - what else could she say to help me? Yet I longed for a friend.
That grey, cold day I learned a life lesson that has helped all kinds of people find purpose and joy whether circumstances are good or painful.
Our empty house and the cold grey skies tempted me to curl up and spend the day alone, nursing my longing for our son. But experience taught me that choice would not lead to a good place. Instead, I lit a fire in our fireplace, curled up under the afghan and started reading a book by a long distance mentor. The next few hours passed quickly as I tried to absorb the message of the my friend, Susan Hunt. A few hours later, I closed the book (I don't remember its title), filled with purpose and hope as the words, "Your circumstances are your platform for glorifying God" stuck in my heart. Mary, the Mother of Jesus, spoke to me through her own response to a turned upside down life, when an angel announced she would have a baby, though she "knew not a man."
Mary knew those few words would forever change her world and create chaos in her family and with her fiance, Joseph. Yet Mary responded, "I am the handmaiden of the Lord. May it be to me as you have said."
Mary's surrender to God's purposes made her circumstances a platform for glorifying her God. Her response confronted me with the question: Could I see the death of my child as a platform, a way to honor my God? The promise of Ephesians 2:10 gave me confidence that before time began God had planned out this pathway for me and that he had good works to be completed by me: "For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do."The riches of Scripture reminded me that my life was not over because of Mark's death. And your life is not over if you have experienced loss. Just as Mark's days were ordained by God before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:15b), so were mine and so are yours. Whether the sun was shining or cloudy skies reigned, He promised to direct my steps as I called on him. My responsibility continues to be to open wide my mouth. His responsibility is to fill it. ("I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it" (Psalm 81:10).
(Treasures in Darkness
, Page 214, 215, used with permission).
Seeing my circumstances as my platform for glorifying God gives me a place to start with every day life. I become more intentional in the way I respond to the tasks before me. Each task has purpose when I see them through the grid of God's glory. Consider how such thinking could change the way you respond to a strong willed child, a wayward child, an angry husband, a broken relationship. Or how you care for your family, your home, pay your bills, interact with your neighbors. Every circumstance becomes an eternal opportunity to reflect Jesus.
If you are struggling with loss, I know this is hard. Remember this revelations was three years after the death of our son. Surrendering to God's purposes can be excruciating. We often resist because to surrender and see our circumstances as our platform for glorifying Him seems to let God off the hook for our loss or grief or anguish. But there is freedom in surrendering to His purpose and seeing every detail of our lives as a gift to offer back to Jesus as a means for helping turn hearts toward Him. Failures, mistakes, bad decisions in our youth, once hidden in shame, can be freely shared at the appropriate time as a means to help protect someone coming behind us from making the same bad choices.
Every person needs purpose. We want to be needed. God gives us purpose and redeems our pain when we choose to see our circumstances as our platform for glorifying Him. The mundane can be transformed into the majestic, the ordinary into the extraordinary as we intentionally embrace our circumstances as a platform, a platform for glorifying Him.
In His grip,
Sharon