When Life Hurts

As I am writing this, I am having flashbacks to my childhood. I don’t know if children do this anymore, but as a kid it wasn’t enough for me just to simply say, “I promise.” Instead, in order for us to really mean it, we had to “pinky promise.” If you dared to break a pinky promise, you were…pretty much the scum of the earth. Okay, I might be exaggerating just a tad, but I think you understand what I am trying to say. A promise is a big thing. To break a promise is even bigger. It’s one thing to have someone on earth make us a promise, but it goes to a whole other level when God makes us a promise. Likewise, it hurts when our friend breaks their promise to us. But when it seems as though God gave up on His promise, hurt doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface. A better feeling word might be abandonment, intense disappointment, or even anger. Yes, we get angry at God. It isn’t something that we generally stand up in church and tell the whole world about, but it’s there. If we don’t recognize it, then we can’t work through it.

Have you ever had a promise from God? Perhaps He made you a promise and it looks nowhere near being fulfilled. The more time that goes by the harder it is to keep the original excitement and happiness that you felt when you first received the promise. I am currently 26-years-old, and I am sure that some of you are still holding onto a promise that God gave you long before I was born. The interesting thing is that since we are human, we are bound by time. But God has no time constraints. God does not run on a time schedule.