Stone in My Shoe

1 Peter 4:19 So then, those who suffer according to God’s will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good.

The other day I slipped on my work shoes and began to walk. Then it hit me! There was something in my shoe other than my foot. Luckily, this time, it wasn’t a brown recluse spider. To be honest, the spider wasn’t in my shoe. It was in my guitar, but that story is for another day.

Now I am sure that my experience with the stone in my shoe is not unique to me, right? You have slipped on a shoe and … And then you stopped walking, slipped off the shoe, dumped the offending object, slipped the shoe back on and proceeded with your journey. That would be the normal thing to do.

But that isn’t what I did. I didn’t feel like slipping off my shoe. I had just put it on and I was feeling lazy. So I kept walking. I bumped my toe against the ground hoping to move the stone all the way to the front of the shoe, out of the way of my toes. That worked for a while.

But the inevitable happened. The stone shifted back again. So this left me no alternative but to take off the shoe, dump the rock, and put the shoe back on again. I bet you saw that coming. I did too!

But sometimes in life, you can’t dump the stone. The painful element is in your life for a season, and there isn’t much you can do to alter the situation. There is no way to remove the offending object, circumstance, situation, person. You have to figure out how to walk with the stone in place.

Most of these painful situations are the result of our actions or the actions of someone else. We as humans have a phenomenal way of messing up our lives and the lives of those around us. We don’t usually do it purposefully, but we do it just the same.

But what if the God of the universe had a plan to use even the worst mess-ups for some greater purpose. Wouldn’t that be awesome! Like those junkyard sculptors who take what others have thrown away and transform it into something unexpected, perhaps even useful. They take the broken and make something whole.

Suffering, when viewed through this lens, can become something that we don’t necessarily want to remove from our lives, because it is in the suffering that God’s will often gets worked out. The friction and pain of those moments can accomplish in our souls something that no other method can do.

We can meet God. We can know him intimately. We can surrender. We can find life.