When all else fails...

What happens when someone you love is overwhelmed by drug addiction and spirals downward into evidences of psychotic and self-destructive behavior?

What happens when a mother--much too young to die--succumbs to a horrible tumor and the vibrancy of her life is snuffed away?

What happens when you've searched for a job for three years and every door has been closed, even though you have exhausted your alternatives in seeking employment?

What happens when you are forced to stand by helplessly when an undiagnosed virus literally ravages a life...and before you can prepare yourself, death overtakes it?

What happens when you've invested all your resources in someone only to watch them walk away and pursue a path of certain failure?

The answer to all of these questions is...we grieve.  We suffer.  We ask what else we could have done? We introspectively assess our last words, our actions, our motives.  And we grieve some more.

I have been involved in situations like this almost daily for the last several months.  If not personally, as a friend, a  pastor, a counselor.  Someone who cares.  Someone who grieves.

And I am convinced that the reason God has allowed me to minister in these kinds of  situations for almost forty-five years is because I am persuaded that when all else has failed...there is still God.

A God who can break the bonds of drug addiction.

A God who can comfort a family who has laid their mother to rest. knowing she is with the Lord.

A God who can supply all of our needs--even when our employment situation is not what we would have chosen--and use the situation as a means of becoming more dependent upon him.

 A God who can remind me, even when death has seemingly triumphed, that Christ is the ultimate victor, and an eternity awaits those who have trusted in him.

A God who loves that person who walks away even more than I do--a God who is vested with divine resources that far outstrip mine in accomplishing His purposes in the life of the one I care for.

When all else fails...there is still God.

"But our citizenship is in heaven.  And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who by the power that enables Him to bring everything under His control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like His glorious body..."  Philippians 3:20,21.