Believers often find themselves up against it. The challenge might be medical, familial, financial, educational, or personal. We tend to think in terms of pressure or stress, and when it gets really bad, trouble. The old Puritans thought in terms of affliction, as well as in terms of God’s antidote to affliction, which is contentment. Samuel Rutherford once said that affliction was like a wine cellar. When I am afflicted, he said, I look for God’s choicest wines.

Contentment is not something that is suspended in a timeless place, but is rather what God is teaching us while we wait for our deliverance. And we are supposed to be looking for that deliverance in such a way as gives us rest in the present. There is a faithless way of looking for deliverance that exacerbates the present troubles, and there is a way of looking for future deliverance that brings a present deliverance. We are called to the latter.

There are two things to remember as you are carrying the weight of an affliction. The first is the “space” of the deliverance, and the other is the “time” of the deliverance. Let us consider the second of these first.

It was a proverb among the descendants of Abraham that “on the mount of the Lord it will be provided.” This came from God’s provision of a ram for Abraham at the last minute, to be substituted for Isaac. As He tells the stories of our lives, we need to come to grips with the fact that God loves cliffhangers. The application that we should draw from this is that we should love cliffhangers too — even though we are the ones hanging from the cliff.

With regard to the “space” of the trial, a weighty difficulty has mass, it takes up room. It is something you have to carry. But as you carry it (to be distinguished from collapsing under it), you grow stronger. Afflictions are God’s weight room, and He can seem sometimes like a particularly hard trainer. When you are benching more than you thought you volunteered for, and way more than what you thought was a good idea, you need to trust Him. He knows more about this than we do.

Read the rest: Doug Wilson — “When Gollum Bit His Finger Off”

We take supposed information about our health, our finances, our relationships, whatever, and knit together a narrative that gives it all meaning. If we know what’s really behind the raised eyebrow of our boss, the discomfort in our stomach, the evasiveness from our spouse, we think that we can finally find some certainty, some calm.

But it doesn’t work. Usually our stories are wrong. And if we are right once, what about the next time? And the times after that? We see a few data points, maybe dozens, but there are countless others that we cannot see and know. Beyond that, assuming we had all (or even most) of the facts, our ability to synthesize and formulate predictions is anything but absolute. We can (and often do) drive ourselves to despair just trying.

Isn’t this why Christ says to take no thought for tomorrow, that the present day has enough troubles of its own? He’s not saying to eschew planning or preparedness. He’s saying not to live in a future that hasn’t yet arrived, one about which we are prone to fret and worry.

Paul gets at the same point when he tells us to be anxious for nothing, but with prayer and thanksgiving, make our requests to God. Paul urges gratitude for the moment and trust for tomorrow.

To do this we need to quiet our imaginations and still our restless minds. The monastic writers of the Church all stress this point. Our imagination leads us astray. We fabricate a world (or worlds) and then live in function of our fantasies, often tormenting ourselves in the process.

Read the rest: Fear and the stories we tell ourselves | Joel J. Miller.