When trusted friendships go awry, people you trusted turn out to be untrustworthy, marriage partners can no longer carry their share of the marriage due to illness, or other issues, what is the Christian person to do?
Some turn away from God and blame Him for not keeping the situation under control. After all, He is all knowing and all powerful. He could have prevented the situation and He did not.
Some don’t turn away from God, but they become doubtful and depressed because He did not prevent the problems that arose. They stall in their Christian faith, not losing it, but just not growing in their faith.
Others run to God for comfort and wisdom. They find solace in His Word and realize that only in God can they find their strength and meaning.
In my experience and observations, I find that people in the first two categories often are in this state because they have come to depend too heavily on the good gift of the relationship and on the other person, instead of on the Giver of those good gifts.
In the case of someone who puts a pastor up on a pedestal and then the pastor commits some heinous sin, people who loved and trusted him have two choices. They can either become cynical about Christianity and leave the church in disgust or they can let the situation drive them closer to God as they realize people will fail them, but God will not.
It’s the same dynamic in personal relationships. When a person becomes too attached and dependent on another person and then that person betrays them or somehow makes a detrimental change to the relationship, it is easy to look at that circumstance and feel that God has failed you, when in reality God did not fail you, that other person failed you.
God did not create His people to be robots. He created us with the ability to choose and the ability to grieve His Holy Spirit. Otherwise the Bible would not tell us to not grieve the Holy Spirit. So God gives people the freedom to make choices and He weaves His sovereignty in and around the choices that He knows we are going to make. He can and does take the bad things others do that upset our applecarts and He turns those things around and uses them for our spiritual good and His glory if we cooperate with Him.
When a friendship goes sour, or when unexpected circumstances strain a relationship, one way we can measure where our stability is anchored is by our reaction to the upset. If we are completely knocked off our moorings, plunged into depression and doubting God, then our meaning and stability was anchored in that relationship instead of God.
This is the time to step back, take some time to get alone with God and re-anchor yourself to the Rock. People will fail you. God will not. Trust Him to use your problems for your spiritual good. Use this time to dig into His word and learn that He will always be there for you.
There is the old joke about the man and woman in the car (back when cars had bench seats). She was sitting over by the passenger door. She says to her husband, "Why don’t we sit close anymore?" Her husband looks at her and says, "I ain’t moved." So often this is true for us. We have some difficulty come up in life that sends us for a tailspin and we begin to lose our joy in the Lord and we ask, "where is God now that I need Him?" God never moved. He has always been there. We just need to change our perspective and look to Him instead of focusing on our circumstances.
One of the best places to see this put in practice is in the Psalms. Time and time again David is in troubled circumstances. He starts the Psalm out complaining and by the end of the Psalm his perspective has changed and he is focusing not on his troubles but on God. David allows his troubles to drive him closer to God. We need to be anchored to the Rock, not other people or circumstances.
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