When Your Affliction Stays

“How long, Lord? How long?”

Like me, you may have been bringing this question before God in rotating circles for years. Some people have walked away from God because of this question. God Himself asked this question, over and over, when His people were stubborn and ‘stiff-necked’. They maligned His name and disrespected His sovereignty. They fell into the embrace of other lovers instead of coming to Him for His perfect love. He called and confronted them through Moses and the prophets. Finally, Jesus Christ came and wept over Jerusalem for their stubborn, blind heart.

Matthew 23:37 (ERV)

“O Jerusalem, Jerusalem! You kill the prophets. You stone to death those that God has sent to you. Many, many times I wanted to help your people. I wanted to gather them together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. But you did not let me.

When your affliction stays, and you’re asking, “how long, Lord?”, do you let Him gather you under His wings like a mother hen gathers her chicks?

How often do we draw near to Jesus, only to keep pounding on His chest saying, “how long will you allow this affliction to deal me blow after blow? I’m crumbling, can’t you see? I’m too weak, can’t you see? I’ve become nothing, can’t you see? Don’t you care?” And Jesus takes the blows, and our cries, waiting for us to stop and see that he wants to gather us, while we continue under the cross of our affliction, without mercy.

2 Corinthians 12:7-9 (NIV)

in order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 

Affliction has to be wrestled to the ground until it is submitted to God’s power.

Is our pride at work if we have not surrendered our affliction to God to use it, instead of continually asking Him to remove it, or heal it, as we’d like?

We want what we want. We feel what we feel. It’s not an easy conundrum. We’re not being intentionally prideful or petulant. We’re just in pain. We don’t want to be in pain. We know God can rid us of that pain if He chooses to. But when He doesn’t ….

For years, I prayed, I fasted, I waited with ‘confident expectation’ (Micah 7:7) for God to change my affliction. I believed in a miracle breakthrough, I confessed it until I began to feel like a fake because it never came. Oh, the loss I felt because of it. The heart-ache that made me feel gauged and raw and unqualified to believe. The relentless battle because of it. How I wept and called on God to be merciful by taking it away, by changing it, by making me worthy of it.

There are always changes. Ups and downs. God has always shown me He has been in those changes; the reason for those changes. He has protected us, reinforced us. Yet the affliction remained, constantly bruising; a reminder I’m not good enough to receive His breakthrough power.

Until one morning, I realised the lie of self-pity.

Until one morning, I realised this is my affliction that God is producing a perfecting work in me. That, yes, feels unfair. That, yes, feels draining. But I had to realise He has chosen not to take it away. And while I battle the thoughts that mock my belief, He wants me to know His grace is sufficient in me, and because of it, His power rests upon me.

Because of my affliction, His power rests upon me.

As I heard those words, this particular morning, I felt something lift. The weight of years of crashing outside God’s door, pounding with a weary fist, crying tears that had carved their mark through well-worn trails down my cheeks and scarred my heart; tears that finally ran dry but still billowed like a thunder cloud rolling inside me. And mocked me. I couldn’t help it. I kept bringing him my dried-out heart saying, ‘see? It’s real! It’s hurting so bad, I can hardly take it. I drag my heart along, cut up and bruised. Nobody else knows it, but can’t you see it? Why aren’t you fixing it? Don’t you love me? Why this destruction?’

I had seen in the past that it was an affliction. Obviously. But I always thought ‘one day’, ‘one day’ God will take it because He knows it’s too much for me. He knows I don’t want this. He knows I’ve done everything I can to try and mend it, fix it, change it, ignore it, rise above it, bury it, while I pray. However I thought I could overcome, I had tried it. Yet, it remained, uninvited and unwelcome.

I had never been willing to accept this was my cross to carry. I had thought, ‘if I just keep believing, just keep persevering, God will see my faith and work a miracle’. I had never been able to see that the reason I still carried my affliction was because of God’s greatest mercy: so that God’s power could rest on me.

1 Corinthians 10:13 (EHV)

No testing has overtaken you except ordinary testing. But God is faithful. He will not allow you to be tested beyond your ability, but when he tests you, he will also bring about the outcome that you are able to bear it.

I finally chose to receive the reality that God wanted something else for me. For years, I had just wanted my affliction gone. That was fair.

But God’s power could rest on me because of my affliction.

I struggled through years of feelings of injustice, isolation, outrage, deep wounding, faith-filled hope piled on top of trauma that left my heart sick. I couldn’t understand why God kept allowing me to live in this pit of despair and call it ‘faith’; ‘a life more abundant’. It clearly wasn’t.

But God’s power could rest on me.

My heart had become a pulpy, bloody mess within me. My mind had become burning embers that kept my wounds too hot to touch.

Proverbs 13:12 (TLB)

Hope deferred makes the heart sick; but when dreams come true at last, there is life and joy.^{[literally, “it is a tree of life.”]}

Where was my tree of life and joy?

I fought my affliction. I ended up just fighting for my mental health and fighting for my faith. God was waiting for me to learn to carry the affliction that others didn't see, that others seemed impervious to, that I felt so alone with, under His power, through His grace, in a way I hadn’t managed to understand.

Surrender is not neutral. Surrender is not meek. Surrender is a war.

2 Corinthians 1:8-10 (NCV)

Brothers and sisters, we want you to know about the trouble we suffered in Asia. We had great burdens there that were beyond our own strength. We even gave up hope of living. Truly, in our own hearts we believed we would die. But this happened so we would not trust in ourselves but in God, who raises people from the dead. God saved us from these great dangers of death, and he will continue to save us. We have put our hope in him, and he will save us again.

God never promised we wouldn’t suffer. In not surrendering my affliction to carry it onward, it carved ever deeper crevices into my psyche that mocked and mocked and mocked my belief in a just and deeply caring God, leaving me feeling like a split personality. My unmet need of relief from my affliction had become an idol.

But He offered help.

The Holy Spirit revealed His expectation that I accept my affliction and begin to walk quietly and at peace with it (if I could). To hold it, instead of trying to discard it. No need for resentment. No need for rescue. No need to battle it. He held me with it. I needed to relinquish the need for it to be gone and receive His ability to work through it.

So many years, and there it was.

My weakness, His power.

My surrender, His mercy.

My healing, His cross.

I pray the Holy Spirit whisper something to you now, that will open your blind eyes to see the reality of your own affliction. Is He waiting for you to carry it without lament anymore, without disbelief, without excuses, under His power? Through His grace? Because He wants you to remain close to Him.

I pray our lives will begin again every day, to tell that story. I pray that unnecessary pulverising pain of needing things to be different will transition into allowing it to be used so His glory can be seen.

• Handle our affliction through God’s amazing grace.

• Accept our affliction with a surrender and gratitude born out of submission to His goodness.

• Measure our affliction by His power at work within us. Take note of all the ways His power rests over us as we allow His grace to work through our affliction.

It’s not something we can fully understand or express. But we know we can believe it, at the feet of Jesus, and ‘one day’ we will be grateful we did.

Philippians 3:16 (the Voice)

For now, let’s hold on to what we have been shown and keep in step with these teachings.

Once we hold on to what we have been shown, we find an oasis of rest.