Forget Not

Hey everyone! I hope everyone had a fantastic thanksgiving!


So for the past several weeks since I posted my last blog I have known exactly what the Lord has wanted my next post to be about..I just was really lazy and chose sleeping over writing one blog post over a topic I know is so prominent in our walk with the Lord.
And that is suffering.
I've been waiting to post on suffering and as I've been waiting I've been procrastinating. But tonight the Holy Spirit threw an awesome passage with two awesome little words embedded inside that verse at me.
"Praise the Lord, O my soul
and forget not all his benefits-" Psalm 103:2
So I discovered Psalm 103 just a few days ago. When I find new passages that I really like, I'll usually read it once and then flock back to it multiple times in my quiet times days after discovering the verse. So I've read this passage before. But as I was reading the passage it was like the words "forget not" jumped off the page, and I really started thinking about their meaning.

Wow. I don't know about you guys, but I am so forgetful.
October was a rough month for me. The Lord took away. It was a season of hurt that I had felt from actions of some people I was very close to, a season of disappointment where goals I desperately wanted to attain were not met, a season of being stretched through the call to forgiving others (and myself) and it was a season of so much pain and a lot of just awful junk in my life.

"Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you face trails of many kinds. For you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance" James 1:2

That verse in James has always been a verse that has popped into my mind when I think about suffering...But when I'm actually in the midst of hard times, it is insanely hard to keep the James 1:2 mindset. You guys, when I was going through all that craziness in October, I guarantee you that I was not considering my suffering "pure joy". No, I was asking God why.  I wanted to know why I was suffering and why He was allowing his own daughter to go through so much hard stuff.
Well then he brought me to Hebrews 12.
"Endure hardship as discipline. God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If youa re not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline) then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live! Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness" -Hebrews 12:7-10
In my suffering I was asking the wrong question. I was asking why instead of how.
God, why are you letting this happen?
vs.
God, how can you use this storm to make me look more like you?
And there, friends, is the beauty of suffering. That is why James told us to have joy in our suffering. We were destined for life separated from God because of our sin. But God came and saved us and through his blood ALONE tore the veil and we can now spend eternity with Him. We deserve nothing good in this life on earth or our life eternally.  But God not only chooses to shower us with blessings, but he takes our suffering and turns it into something beautiful.
He uses our suffering to show us that he redeems all things.
He uses our suffering to remind us that "in all things God works for the good of those who love Him" -Romans 8:38
Who are we to deserve a God who can take the suffering we rightly deserve and use it to make us more resemble His son who came and died for us? We are called to be joyful in our suffering because the ability to be transformed in hard times is such a testament to the unfathomable love the Lord has for his children.
That is why God commands us to "forget not". In the middle of our suffering, if we remember how Great our God is we can choose joy in knowing that the Lord has an ultimate purpose to mold us into the likeness of our redeemer.
And how cool is that?
-Hannah