More hospital than resort - Part 1

I had this entire blog post ready to go a couple of days ago and then I slicked the "Start a New Post" link in Scribfire instead of the "Publish Post" button. Yeah, duh.

I have blogged about this before, but I was thinking anew the other night in Community Group about this world, this life, as more hospital than resort. I know that when I look at this world as a hospital where medical treatment is rendered to my broken heart and soul my expectations are much more in line with what I receive. I find that I am less disappointed with what is going on around me and more reflective on what I need to change about me or cognizant of the Physician that is involved in my healing. But that is actually ancillary to my post.

I have found that when I am in a with someone who is recovering in a hospital that they are disturbed all of the time either by nurses or doctors as they administer medicine, take care of one need or another, or monitor vital signs to determine whether the course of treatment is having the desired effect. Now, I have done a fair amount of traveling in my day and I have to say that if I was as disturbed in a hotel or resort as I was in a hospital I would be making a call down to the front desk to have it remedied. No such calls would be made to the nurses' station to report the hospital disturbances because, well, that would just be strange and may actually hinder the healing that the people who were disturbing me were trying to administer.

I find that I am jostled quite a bit in this life. I am not in a situation where all of my relationships and areas of my life are all easy all the time. But, I am in a hospital after all, and these disturbances are the ones that heal. They are, at the very least, permitted by God and used by Him to make me more like His Son. There is no sense phoning in a complaint to Him as He knows exactly what He is doing to produce the righteousness in me that He desires.

What I need to do is to submit to those disturbances as a loving act from a loving God. I need to understand that He not only loves me through the disturbances, He brings me to them (or them to me) as an act of love. In His goodness He has me struggle with my health, weight, spouse, children, work, church, friends, and a myriad of other things. It is in these disturbances when His medicine is administered to my soul and when He, it seems, is at His best (if I can say that). Why is it that I am often at my worst in those times? Why indeed...

But that is not the only reason that I see this world as more hospital than resort. More on that later.