anything at all? God’s answer to this question will come decades after this game, only after I’ve trusted Him with the answer. John, I watch how hard you try to continue to draw near to Me, even as I allow things into your life that utterly exasperate you. You’re clinging to the belief that I am fully for you and care more about you than you do. Then some- thing happens that seems to undermine it all. I know. I watch. It deeply hurts me to watch. You experience such disappointment and a broken heart. You might try to let Me off the hook by reasoning I’m not fully in control of your world. Such thinking might maintain a measure of your affection for Me—like giving a pass for a grandfather who loves you but can’t always remember your name. But this lie will ultimately ruin our relationship. I am fully in control of your world. There is nothing that happens, doesn’t happen, refused, or delayed without Me seeing it or allowing it. I am in control of your life. And I love you more than you love you. My character cannot and will not do wrong. I take whatever life has brought on, and I redeem, refashion, and rework it all into beauty beyond anything you could have possibly imagined. All things. Horrible things. Evil things. Chronic things. I decide what is allowed through and what it will accomplish. I decide what needs to be refashioned. But mostly I stand in the arena when you cannot stand, defending you and protecting you. I do not lecture; I do not mock. What I do is love you, no matter how angry you are at Me, no matter what you imagine in your heart about Me. I enter into your pain more deeply than even you. This I can do. This I will always do. Until we are home together in the land where tears cease. Ĩ 42 WWW.AGRM.ORG MAY/JUNE 2017 By reflex I got out the words “Um, I’m not John Pierson. I’m John Lynch.” “Oh, sorry. Could you point out John Pierson to me?” As my friends found excuses to leave at that moment, my dad and I began to make our way out from under the lights and into the dark neighbor- hood where our car was parked. Nothing was spoken. But another layer of shame got added to the story, which begins with the words, “Lynch, there is something uniquely and particularly wrong with you.” Story of My Life F or the rest of my life, I have watched many versions of that story get played out. It kicks the wind out of you. If you know God, it can twist your picture of Him. As long as I believed God’s goal for my life should be painless and smooth, with only happy endings, I would live in a cognitive dissonance that would make me pull back and protect myself. I can slip into dangerous thinking that if He’s good and powerful, our lives should be smoother and less messy than others. Bad guys should lose more often. Good guys, with a big curve and a dream, should most often win. Sometimes it works that way. Often it does not. God apparently allows some of the pain of a fallen world to get through to us—believer or not. It’s what He does with the pain and bad endings that ultimately proves His love and goodness. If He is able to take all of the twisted mess that finds us and is somehow able to turn it into our good, that would be something very amazing indeed. This is exactly what He says He is doing. “I will cause all things to work together for good”...for the likes of us. That night at the All-State game made no sense to me. How could something I worked this hard for end up more painful than having never tried John has been an international speaker with Trueface since 1997, and spent 27 years as a teaching pastor at Open Door Fellowship in Phoenix, Arizona. He has co-authored several books, as well as authoring his own story in On My Worst Day, from which this article is adapted. I can slip into dangerous thinking that if He’s good and powerful, our lives should be smoother and less messy than others.