“I HAVE NOT LEFT YOU ORPHANS” SERIES:

Whereas most of this show is about catching sight of a new vision, this series is about the times we lack vision, and our faith must spring from a ‘hope unseen’. 

There are those life situations where we simply cannot see God - perhaps an area of suffering in your life or that which you witness in others, a question you simply cannot see the answer to, a promise of God which you do not see fulfilled.  And perhaps if you’ve dared acknowledge these things in your heart, you are met with an onslaught of emotion - fear, anxiety, dought, anger - how could God possibly be in this?  

What we see from our vantage point is a vision of a circumstance where God is not present, his grace is not active, those involved are abandoned by him.  This is the ‘orphan spirit’, the mindset of abandonment, which reigns over certain memories in our lives and speaks limitations over how far we believe God’s love will go.   It is the antithesis to the ‘spirit of sonship’ which is confident in the Father’s love in the midst of all circumstances, even when it cannot see.

It is hard to be in the midst of this blindness, and what we yearn for is vision:  answers, God’s perspective for the situation, to know how he’s working in another’s life, to know why.  

Though we lack vision, and struggle to find purpose in the suffering, there is One who did see, and chose to pass through the place of abandonment anyway: God himself went to the place of abandonment.  Jesus cried out from the cross, with his dying breath, ‘My God, My God, why have you abandoned me?’(Matt. 27:46)  He entered into abandonment so that even those who feel most unreached by God can pray that prayer in union with Jesus.  And where the Son is, there the Father is. (Matt. 20:40.)  

I take hope in the fact that he, in his human pain, but with the vision of God, knew it all to be worth it.  I expect if we knew what he knew, all our questions would shrink away.  Perhaps that’s how it will be when we see him face to face:  rather than have all our questions answered, they will simply fade to nothingness as the light of his face illuminates all.  

He asks us to trust him even in the midst of our blindness.   He promised “I will not leave you as orphans”  (Jn 14:18).  Even from our vantage point of blindness we can proclaim that over our specific circumstances and memories.  That is why I’ve titled this series ‘I have not left you orphans’.  I believe God wants to meet us in our memories and proclaim this truth over us.  In an act of faith we can proclaim it with him.