Many Adventists are familiar with the story Mindy, a bittersweet account of a vivacious Adventist young woman who marries out of the church and thus buys herself a lifetime of sorrow. Perhaps the book’s most telling moment is when Mindy, now an aging grandmother, decides that it’s time for her granddaughter to go away to an Adventist boarding school, fearing she too might make the same life-altering blunder:
It was important for a Seventh-day Adventist girl to marry one of her own kind. She looked at her husband a long, thoughtful moment as she closed the door and leaned against it. Indeed it was. Very, very important [1].
As one ponders the sadness that clouds this story, it’s easy to think that a better title for the book might have been Where the Shadows Are Never Lifted—a signature phrase by the modern prophet as she warns a young woman against making such a choice [2].
But another memorable exchange in this narrative occurs early on, as Mindy and her unbelieving husband reflect on the pain involved in the birth of their first child:
“It was harder than I expected—having a baby.”
“Where was your God through all that?”
“Right here, Carl, as concerned as you were, I believe.”
“Do you think I would have let you suffer like that if I had had power to help you?”
Mindy did not answer quickly. It was an old question. Carl was not the first to ask it, and she didn’t have any pat answer [3].
“Pat answers,” like clichés, are often annoying as well as unsatisfying, but as the late U.S. presidential historian Theodore White wrote long ago, “clichés are generally true” [4]. The key is to subordinate unruly or even legitimate emotions to factual reality. This is a principal component in what religion—the Bible in particular—identifies as faith.
Like any loving spouse, parent, or friend, Mindy’s husband would doubtless have relieved her suffering had he possessed the power to do so. But then, had he been able, he would likely also have given her vast amounts of material wealth, with all the adverse consequences such prosperity risks. Only an all-knowing God, who understands the strengths, weaknesses, and character potential of every heart (I Kings 8:39), can be trusted to permit fallible mortals to experience weal, woe, and varied blendings thereof, proportioned in just the right manner so as to develop godly strength and thus bear wisely both the trials and the triumphs of life.
When Trusting God Isn’t Easy
Non-religious moral conservatives, like Mindy’s husband, perhaps qualify as the most miserable of human beings, the most wretched of legalists. (At least the Pharisees believed in a transcendent God who would one day reward them if they worked hard enough.) While clinging to a moral culture whose strictures are informed primarily by religion, the non-religious moralist retains a skeptical, almost deistic view of God’s role in the world, thus leaving himself nothing but his own self to lean upon in times of crisis. Those who stoically wrest their subsistence from the stubborn land year after year, decade after decade, often perceive themselves resilient and vigorous enough to endure on their own the slings and arrows of life—until, of course, they face the bursting of a storm too strong for the strongest humans.
In the midst of such a storm, only the godly can truly know peace. The pull of the heart may strain at the anchor of the mind; both feelings and the intellect may recoil at God’s apparent injustice. But in the end, only the grip of faith on the ultimate Guiding Hand can soothe the spirit and assure the heart of answers to come in God’s good time.
During my junior year in college, I experienced a painful disappointment. As has often occurred in such moments, my heart found voice in lyrical expression. Under the title “Faith,” I wrote the following:
Naked in the gale of circumstance I stand
Trusting to my Lord’s firm, faithful guiding hand
Darkened though the path seems, sullen though the sky
Yet I trust that God will someday answer why.
Truth seems on the scaffold, Error on the throne
Yet my faith and trust, Lord, rests in Thee alone
From defeat I rise, with added strength and grace
Trusting that in God’s scheme, Crisis has its place.
How I times Despair eclipses one’s resolve!
How, when faith grows dim, doubts through one’s mind revolve!
Yet I cannot falter, not at this late hour
Onward I must march, imbued with Heaven’s power.
Evil’s plumes unfold, their hateful shadows cast
Yet I trust that my Lord’s word will be the last
Fierce the tempest rages, hope appears to fail.
Yet I know that truth will finally prevail.
Conclusion: “Though He slay me . . .”
The story of Job’s travail tells us much, but also leaves much out. One has a hard time believing that the trial of faith depicted in the Sacred Record was the patriarch’s first, though it was doubtless his most severe. Sun-swept though his life appears to have been before his entrance into the Bible narrative, his experience till that moment likely included any number of pivotal tests, moments in which his trust in God was proved. Whatever had marked Job’s life till then, enough had occurred so that he knew God had a plan, that things happened for a reason, and that even if his grip on faith might have weakened at times, his confidence in the divine care and keeping never broke. God had evidently come through for him on so many former occasions that even the worst calamity failed to sunder his hope or divert his gaze from the ultimate prize.
Few Bible verses offer a stronger rebuke to the comfort-seeking, assurance-obsessed salvation theology of our day than Job’s declaration, in the midst of his ordeal: “Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him” (Job 13:15). We can be sure it wasn’t easy for Job to say this—with his world literally in shards and ashes, his wealth obliterated, his ten children dead, his companions reduced to a nagging wife and three “friends” accusing him of having provoked God’s wrath. But his faith survived, his prosperity returned, and his spiritual journey emerged with a wealth far greater: the shining memory of God’s eternal faithfulness.
Speaking of the struggle for purity of thought, Ellen White states: “If the mind wanders, we must bring it back; by persevering effort, habit will finally make it easy” [5]. The struggle for a calm trust in divine providence is no different. The journey of life will contain innumerable mountains and valleys, steeps and stumbles, wonders and wastes. But through it all, for the courageous and consecrated, God stands near to offer grace and strength, so that even the ultimate test will find our confidence undimmed and our faith unshakable.
REFERENCES
1. June Strong, Mindy—Tintype of a Marriage (Nashville, TN: Southern Publishing Assn, 1977), p. 242.
2. Ellen G. White, Messages to Young People, p. 440.
3. Strong, Mindy, p. 70.
4. Theodore H. White, The Making of the President—1968 (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1969), p. 486.
5. Ellen G. White, Messages to Young People, p. 115.
Pastor Kevin Paulson holds a Bachelor’s degree in theology from Pacific Union College, a Master of Arts in systematic theology from Loma Linda University, and a Master of Divinity from the SDA Theological Seminary at Andrews University. He served the Greater New York Conference of Seventh-day Adventists for ten years as a Bible instructor, evangelist, and local pastor. He writes regularly for Liberty magazine and does script writing for various evangelistic ministries within the denomination. He continues to hold evangelistic and revival meetings throughout the North American Division and beyond, and is a sought-after seminar speaker relative to current issues in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He presently resides in Berrien Springs, Michigan