Always Bigger

When I sat down to write tonight's blog post, I wasn't really sure what to say.  Today was a pretty average Monday.  Four classes, work at the Tutoring Center, food, trying to sit and rest my feet whenever I could.  So I sat here thinking, and my eyes kept drifting time and time again to this sheet of paper taped on the wall above my desk.

I've probably posted it before, but I can't stop thinking about it right now.

The Gospel is always bigger.

The Gospel has power that no human, and more importantly, no amount of evil and brokenness can touch.  The Gospel has the power to make you feel like you've got all the strength in the world behind you but simultaneously make you feel smaller than an ant as you kneel before the only One who really is invincible.  The Gospel has the power to give you no choice but to face the truth but somehow, at the same time, make you glad to do it.

The Gospel can heal any broken heart, cleanse a body of any illness, restore any broken spirit, and defeat any evil.  The Gospel can bring families torn apart back together, give inexplicable peace, save the people who don't realize they need saving, and piece back together lives that have been given up on by the world.

Because thankfully, He knows all the things that we do not.  He knows that no one is worth giving up on.  He is faithful when we are not.

It wasn't until after my baptism that I started opening my Bible and reading it.  And I mean, really reading it. Not the kind of reading that is more like skimming over the words where all you think at the end is "Hm. Cool story.", but the kind where I sit and just try to fathom what Jesus was like, what it must've felt like to be one of the disciples and sit with him and talk with him and learn from him.  I try to comprehend the kind of heart he must've had, to the point where his every word was one of love and a lesson from the Father.  I try to imagine seeing a man you loved deeply hanging on a cross in complete innocence.  I try to accept the unconditional love it must've taken for him to cry out, "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do."  He prayed for the men who were torturing and killing him.

I try.  I try so hard, but I just can't.  It's hard for a nerdy control freak like me to accept the fact that Someone loves me without question, absolutely unconditionally, no matter how badly I screw things up.  All I know is that knowing the Truth that the Gospel holds only makes me want to know Him better, share my testimony more, give Him even more of me, decrease even more each day so that He may increase.

This is the kind of thing that the God in the Gospel can do, people.  He can save a girl who contemplated suicide on a daily basis for years when she didn't even believe He existed.  He can blow the minds of some of the best doctors in the country who have no choice but to say to a very broken little girl "I have no idea how you survived this."  He can convince a girl who had been told all her life she didn't deserve to be loved that she deserved love as much as anyone else, and to prove it, bring her people who love her through the good and the bad, people who were shining examples of grace and forgiveness when she was terrified they'd leave her for failing them.  He can transform lives.  Only He can radically transform lives.

The Truth that lies in those pages saves lives.  It certainly saved mine.  Just not via the methods you'd expect.

And that's the cool part.  God is somehow always reliable and always faithful, but also full of surprises.

So whatever trial you're facing tonight, lay it at His feet, because I may not be able to tell you when or how it will be fixed and redeemed, but I can tell you this much:  Whatever it is, it's not as big as He is.  He is always bigger.