The Lie of Circumstances

If you do not do so already, imagine living a life of relative prosperity, and security – one in which all of your needs are met – only to have to flee for your life, across some border in another country, due to a famine or foreign invasion. Now you exist in what to you are ramshackle dwellings. In this example, maybe you don’t do it alone, but have a spouse and children that you have to take with you. Everyone there is just like you: unable to see what the future will hold, poor, with depleted hopes, with luxuries of the previous life lived now wholly out of reach.

And regardless of this horrible reality, there is a safety here that you did not have before you had to live in a refugee camp.

Among those that I have encountered that have risked the most in order to live out their whole-hearted faith, tragedies have afflicted them most unjustly. In all of the cases I have seen, the personal hopes for their lives were badly jeopardized, due to a series of sufferings and difficulties that left them scars, wary, and weary due to their pursuit of God and His will.

None were wealthy. None were prosperous. None had seen a breakthrough in their lives they always hoped God would give them, but they are all holding on. Now they all ask themselves: “why have other believers I know found their way to the things they needed and wanted in life, when I have tried much harder than them to pursue God, and have received nothing? Does God still care about my dreams?”

It makes them seem less significant. They wonder whether they should seriously regret the path they have taken. Maybe they should not have lived so much of their life by faith – or maybe they just didn’t hear God, or were maybe not at all led by the Holy Spirit in their endeavors. Maybe they will die in regret of all that they could not have. All of these thoughts dwell in them after all that has happened to them.

And maybe this reality will never budge. They can’t control God, and they have done their best, so what else is there than to surrender to the perceived truth that they are indeed people that carry no real standing before God.

In a world of refugee camps, there exists no one of high standing. There are no rich people. There exists no threatened dream – since those have been mostly dashed already. Here, everyone is the same, and although things are terribly bad, no one’s singular destitution (although there is plenty of pain to go around) is felt anywhere near as much as before the time of the refugee camp – because there is no immediate person to compare oneself to that is doing better than us.

The contrast with the successful/provisioned with one’s own lacking life creates an existential distress that threatens to topple even the best people. It greatly amplifies our sense of what we do not (yet) have.

And yet it is often all a lie – and it is frequently the well provisioned, and the fulfilled, who have not paid an existential price to God, to be trusted with such fulfillment. They skimped their cross, and used worldly means to obtain what they want, and expended all of their energy in their pursuit of their desires, instead of their pursuit of God, and his Kingdom – but verbally justify it as God’s favor alone, even if this is not true.

Here’s a passage from the book of James that no preacher seems to want to touch:

⁹ Believers in humble circumstances ought to take pride in their high position. ¹⁰ But the rich should take pride in their humiliation—since they will pass away like a wild flower. (James 1:9-10).

And why would they want to touch it? – It potentially jeopardizes everyone’s justification for their own good lives. People do not want to face the reality which emerges: that wealth and provision are often (but not always) associated with lowly standing in God. They are compared with being of temporal value. The poor have a privilege of having to exist in a context where faith for needs is required, which will be remembered by an eternal God who is pleased by it – and which directly builds relationship with Him. Of course we live in different seasons of life, and that those seasons come with times of less or more money, or other forms of provision one is counting on – but even in these times we must often (not in every instance, however) respond to these seasons in the inverse way that the world does – that poverty and lack is a sign of high standing (when we’ve done nothing wrong to get there), and the rich are often those who do not have it.

There are consequences when this reality is not taken into consideration – that the lowly in circumstance become divorced from their sense of greatness that is essential in persisting in their difficulty.

The reality is this: that those who hold on to God with a long line of tragedies, in unfulfillment, while yearning for a breakthrough, may first need to rejoice in that which they do not have, in order accept an identity of favor, which will carry them in ways their provision never could.

If they grasp a sense of honor through a form of material provision, and not grab it despite the lack of it, isn’t their sense of dignity now just like the worlds: dependent on a circumstance? And if they have suffered greatly over a long duration, doesn’t their immediate circumstance-based relief now even more firmly cement them into a worldly nature if they haven’t found their dignity beforehand?

Unless “just holding on” turns in to “I am greater than that which I do not have”, getting what we want causes guaranteed forfeiture of who we were supposed to become.