We Will See

If your mother dies when you’re four years old, and then six years later your dad dies, we would understand if you struggled to adjust in life. If that loss wasn’t hard enough, let’s say your stepmother was a difficult person so you went to live with an older brother. Some years pass and then, despite all the challenges, let’s say you were able to get into a big-time academic college. All of this is exactly what happened to Thomas Shepard.

Thomas was living an out-of-control life at Cambridge. In his diary he admits he couldn’t see straight for all the turmoil he was in. And who could blame him? But then, on a particularly difficult day, he went outside and found an open field and began crying. In those moments of desperation, Thomas cried out for help. By his own testimony, this marked the beginning of Thomas’s relationship with Jesus that would affect his vision the rest of his too-short life.

Thomas Shepard is further evidence that coming to saving faith in Jesus doesn’t always make one’s life easier—instantly, or ever. Fast-forward some years and Thomas gets married and has children. And then his eldest son dies. The Shepard family eventually decides to move from England to America. Almost beyond comprehension, after the long and difficult voyage to Massachusetts in colonial America, Thomas’s wife died. More time passes and Thomas’s second wife and other children die.

Eventually, Thomas would lose his own life at age 44 from, of all things, a complication of tonsillitis. In his abbreviated life (1605-1649), Thomas was considered a leading minister in Massachusetts. The witness of God’s effective grace in his life can be seen in the diversity of his ministry—his reputation for serving both Native Americans as well as students at the recently formed school for the training of ministers—Harvard University. Even today, nearly 400 years after the fact, a plaque remains at Harvard to commemorate the impact Thomas Shephard had on the school.

One of the lasting artifacts of Thomas that I value—both as a Christ-follower and as a counselor—is what he came to refer to as, “God’s great plot.”  Amid all his loss, suffering, and grieving, Thomas took what he believed—by faith and experience—and put together a framework that held together an unwinding life and made sense of what appeared to be senseless.

In his book, A Heart Aflame for God, author Matthew Bingham uses Thomas Shepard and others of that time as examples of those who learned how to do self-examination within a wider net of theological understanding. “This broader sense involves thinking deliberately about one’s life as a story that God is writing. It involves training one’s mind and heart to reframe life’s apparent chaos as something orderly, purposeful, and imbued with divinely ordained meaning” (p. 211).  

What Bingham spells out, using Thomas Shepard as an example, is just the kind of work I help people process during their own seasons of lost vision. The practice of “training one’s mind and heart to reframe life’s apparent chaos” requires the sorts of things to which today’s culture runs counter: focus without distraction, down time, self-suspicion, and willingness to not get it right the first time. Or the second or third.  

There are the usual suspects that cause people to lose sight of their lives and purpose in life. We all fall into them—either momentarily or for longer stretches of time—like selfishness, greed, envy, coveting, bitterness, jealousy, anger, and anxiety. These sins and struggles are what we could call lens dilaters. When we engage them, our line-of-sight narrows. We lose touch with what we would otherwise properly love if we were not blinded by the passions that preoccupied us.

Beyond these, there are other culprits that can cause degrees of distortion in seeing life clearly—like traumas, illnesses, chronic pain, substance abuses, relational brokenness such as marital discord, family dysfunctions, and co-worker wounds. I’ll call these places in life de-humanizing. These struggles can make a person feel as if they are losing their true self, their dignity, and their place and purpose in the world. These disorientations are also what we might call “seeing” problems.

Mercifully, Christ-followers believe in the God-who-sees, even as Hagar learned in her duress and so had her vision corrected (Genesis 16). The servant of Elisha also had his vision corrected when, after seeing a great enemy army and being convinced of certain defeat, Elisha prays for his servant’s eyes to be opened. Not only was the servant then able to see the host of heaven’s armies and be comforted, but then Elisha prays again and the hostile army of Aram is struck with blindness (2 Kings 6:8-23). The irony!

These acts of God in correcting our seeing are not frozen in time in the Bible—they should be regularly occurring experiences for those who seek and follow Jesus. God Almighty has a plot line, and we should expect His sight adjustments as we read and meditate on his Word, as we look to him in corporate worship through sermon and song, as we participate together in communion, as we go through each day waiting on him and looking for him wherever he may be found.

As this calendar year winds down and our eyes look ahead, I’d like to ask if you’d consider partnering with me as I endeavor to help others see God’s great plot line in their own lives. Grace Harbor is a nonprofit that depends on donors to make up what we do not make in our service fees. It could be a rural pastor who cannot afford it, or a wife whose husband is not supportive, or a family who is simply stretched too far through a job loss or illness. These, and others, are the kinds of places people find themselves lost.

If your giving plan allows it, we’d be grateful for your financial support and your prayers—for sustaining the ministry and for the minister. You can donate to Grace Harbor several ways, both now and throughout the year:

You can mail a gift to Grace Harbor, P.O. Box 25333, Greenville, SC 29616.

You can donate via our PayPal link on our web site: Here

You can donate stock by contacting us directly: (864) 915-7070

Thank you. Merry Christmas, everyone!