How do you help your shabby lawn become the most envied turf on the block? Create the right environment for it, of course! The right combination of water, fertilizer, and sun can produce green blades even your dad would be proud of. The reverse is also true…get the combination wrong, and your lush grass will be a past memory.
I recently razed portions of my lawn due to over ambitious fertilizing. I didn’t realize that too much fertilizer leads to harsh burns. It was my first time using a push-cart spreader, and I was having far too much fun playing “farmer Jon.” With pass after pass, I gave the lawn coat upon coat of the white powder. “Just to be sure” every spot was covered, I even took out fistfuls of fertilizer and threw them into spots that looked neglected. To my horror, over the next week I watched as brown spots of scorched earth began to appear all over my grass. Eventually, my lawn looked like part zebra, and part Dalmatian. Lesson learned: get the environment right, and maximum growth is possible. Get the environment wrong, and growth is stifled and even reversed.
It’s the same with fish…once again, I learned my lesson by getting the environment wrong. I recently bought my kids two gold fish, thinking these little guys had the best chance of survival in a house as busy as ours, because everyone knows “It’s impossible to kill gold fish.” As such, I was shocked one day as I entered my kids’ room and found one of our two hearty fish bobbing upside down on the surface. After consoling my kids through their tears and officiating a back yard fish funeral, I dutifully cleaned the tank, hoping to preserve the life of our second fish. We even bought a replacement fish that day, and by bedtime, there were two happy swimmers fluttering through the water. And then it happened…both fish died the next day. Three fish down in two days! What could possibly be the problem? Eventually we discovered that each morning, in addition to my regular and apportioned feeding of the fish, my two oldest children were dutifully (and surreptitiously) feeding the fish as well. As a result, the fish were gorging themselves, and suffocating in toxic water caused by excess food and defecation. And so it is, you CAN kill a goldfish!
What’s true of grass and fish is also true of faith. According to the Bible, faith is one of our most valuable assets as believers in Christ. The apostle Peter writes that faith is more precious than gold (1 Peter 1:7). It’s faith that God uses to “cause us to be born again” and faith is God’s means of guarding us as we mature in Christ (1:3-5). In the end, the outcome of our faith will be the salvation of our souls (1:9). If faith is that important, wouldn’t we want to put ourselves in environments where faith will grow most assuredly? But here’s the problem. According to Peter, one of the best environments for faith-growth is an environment of suffering…
Suffering is an ironic environment. No one wants to go through suffering, and yet everyone values the benefits of suffering in hind sight. It’s undeniable: as we look back on our lives, we see that we matured the most when we endured suffering. Peter compares suffering to the purification process for precious metals. Just like gold must go though the fire of a kiln to burn away the dross and prove it’s purity, faith must also go through the strain of hardship and suffering in order to be purified, strengthened, matured and proved true (1 Peter 1:7). It makes sense, of course. When a loved one is struck with cancer, we learn what it means to trust God with the outcome of our physical bodies. When a student suffers through the embarrassment of being ridiculed for her Christian beliefs in class, she finds her faith growing as she learns to defend the reason for her hope. When we suffer through the strain of relational abandonment, we learn to put our faith in God alone for security. Even spiritual doubts, a form of suffering to be sure, produce a more robust faith in the end as the doubter works through his questions. Just think for a moment of the most rock-solid, faith-displaying believers you know…I can almost guarantee they’ve been through their fair share of suffering.
Where does all this leave us? With a choice. Each day as inconveniences, common problems, and serious trials hit our plate we can decide to complain, fret, fuss, deny, and resist our way through them. Or, we can embrace each form of suffering as an opportunity for our faith to grow! In short, don’t waste your suffering! Leverage each trial as an opportunity to trust God more.
Great insights!! Thanks.