The idea is from Soren Kierkegaard who once said that we live forward and believe backward. In the moment we often cannot identify the presence or work of God in our lives, but as we look backward we see clearly the hand of God at work.
One of my all time favorite people blessed my life with the story of the birth of her son. She and her husband had talked before the delivery about doing no extraordinary measures if anything was significantly wrong with the baby...believing at the time that everything was normal...and they had communicated that with their doctor. The day she went into labor, her husband was traveling and she could not reach him, her primary doctor was out of town, and her son was born critically ill. No one involved in the delivery knew of the decisions. The baby was rushed to a different city on life support.
My friends were frustrated and angry that their plan had been thwarted and now they had a child on life-support who wouldn't live. The pain of making the necessary decisions was agonizing. Three weeks after their son was born, they said good-bye.
A couple years later, she told me this story. I was holding their newborn daughter. The story ended with the words, "I guess God knew better than we did. If I hadn't spent three weeks holding and loving John, I would never have been brave enough to try again."
Live forward...believe backward. We celebrated the work of God after we were out of the situation.
There are reasons God calls us into Christian community--which may seem like the most boring place ever to practice our faith. How often have we wished for the "God on the golf-course" idea?!!! But it is in the practice through the pain, in the endurance of the ennui, in the serving of the society that we can look back and see God at work.
Live forward...believe backward...my inspiration for the day...
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