Chasing God in the Ruins

There are seasons where everything you built starts coming apart, and you find out very quickly what your faith is actually made of. I've had a few of those. I don't want to talk about the specifics. I want to talk about what I learned standing inside the dust.

If you are in a hard season right now, I'm not going to promise you that the morning is two days away. I don't know that. Nobody but God knows that. What I can promise you is that the same God who let the wall fall is the God who walks with you in the rubble. And the chase doesn't pause for ruin. It changes shape inside of it.

When the Walls Fall

I have watched people, including myself, scramble to rebuild the second something breaks. It's instinct. We don't like open ground. We want to put up walls again as fast as possible — busy ourselves, distract ourselves, fix ourselves, fix the situation, anything to avoid the silence the ruin creates.

But sometimes God lets the silence stay. Sometimes the rebuilding isn't the next assignment. Sometimes the assignment is to stand inside the loss and let Him meet you there.

That sounds harsh until you read Lamentations. The book is literally named after grief. Jerusalem was a heap of stones. The poet has watched his people starve. There is no quick fix in those chapters. And right in the middle of all of it, he says this.

Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.

He's not denying the ruins. He's standing in them. The city is rubble. The temple is rubble. And he is still saying, His compassions never fail. New every morning. Not new every fix, or new every breakthrough, or new every comeback story. New every morning. Even the mornings where nothing visible has changed.

That has been my anchor more than once.

The Valley Is Still His Pasture

Psalm 23 is so familiar that we read it like a greeting card. But it is a warrior-king's confession of what kept him alive when death was breathing on him. Read it again, slowly.

Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Notice what David does not say. He does not say, You will pull me out of the valley before I have to actually walk through it. He says, I will walk through it. The path goes through. And the comfort is not the absence of the valley. The comfort is the presence of the Shepherd in the valley.

That distinction matters. Because if your theology of suffering requires God to evacuate you out of every hard place, your faith will not survive the seasons where He decides to walk you through one instead. He has the right to do that. He often does. And there is a kind of nearness available in the valley that does not seem to be available anywhere else.

I cannot explain that. I can only report it. There was a season — I won't say which one — where I was, by any external measure, in trouble. And I have never, in my life, felt the Lord closer than I did in the middle of it. Not because the trouble was good. Because He was there.

What Job Did Not Have

When we talk about suffering, we eventually have to talk about Job, because Job is where the Bible is most honest about how dark it can get for a faithful person. He loses almost everything in a single day. His friends arrive and make it worse. His wife tells him to give up. And he doesn't have any of the answers we have. He doesn't know about the cross. He doesn't know about the empty tomb. He doesn't even fully know about the conversation that started the whole thing.

What he says, with no resurrection theology to lean on, is this.

But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.

He doesn't say, I know what God is doing. He says, He knows the way I take. That's the part Job is sure of. God is not lost. God is not surprised. God is not absent. The path is dark from where Job is standing, but it is not dark to the One walking with him.

You and I have something Job didn't have. We have a Savior who was crushed and came out the other side. We have Romans 8 in our hands. We have a Spirit interceding for us when we don't have words. So if Job could say he knows the way I take from his ash heap, then by the same God we can say it from ours.

What the Hard Season Is For

James says something about trials that I used to skim past, because frankly I didn't want it to be true.

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

Pure joy. Not because the trial is good. Because of what the trial is making in you. James is telling us that there is a finished product on the other side of perseverance — a maturity, a completeness, a soul that is no longer missing pieces. And that finished product cannot be manufactured in any other workshop. The hard place is the workshop.

I am not going to wrap a bow around this. I have known believers who suffered terribly and did not see the breakthrough on this side of the veil. I have known believers who lost children, lost spouses, lost their health, lost their reputation, lost their footing. The bow does not always tie in this life. Some of the gold Job is talking about is not handed out until we see Jesus face to face.

But Paul, who suffered as much as anyone in the New Testament, said this — and I have leaned on it more times than I can count.

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.

Not worth comparing. Whatever the weight you are carrying right now, on the scale of eternity it is not even close. That is not a denial of the weight. Paul knew the weight. He just knew the glory more.

How to Chase from the Rubble

So how do you actually chase God in the ruins? Practically?

You open the Bible even when it feels dry. You pray short, honest prayers — sometimes one sentence is more honest than an hour. You let other believers in. You stop performing the suffering for an audience and you bring it before the Father, who already knows. You preach Lamentations 3 to yourself in the morning before the day talks you out of it. You let the Shepherd hold the rod and the staff. You walk one more step.

You also stop demanding a timeline. The dark night is not on your calendar. It is on His. And He has never once been late, even when He has not been early.

I keep thinking about the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Their world had just collapsed. The teacher they loved had been crucified. They were walking away, defeated, telling a stranger about the catastrophe — and the stranger was Jesus. They didn't recognize Him at first. But He was already on the road with them. Already walking. Already explaining. Already turning the ruin into the doorway.

He does that. He has not stopped doing that. He is not absent from your ruin. He is on the road. And when your eyes finally open, you'll see that the chase was never lonely — He has been the One walking beside you the whole time, the One you were chasing and the One who has been carrying you.

The book I'm writing has a much longer treatment of this — the practices, the postures, the Scriptures I keep returning to when the ground gives out. For now, just take the next step. Whatever it is. Open the Word. Whisper His name. Ask Him to be near. He will.

May the God of all comfort meet you in the rubble, walk with you through the valley, and bring you forth as gold in His time.

Soso lobi.