God is Good But What if His Call is Dreadful

“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"..."Safe?" said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

God is good. But life’s path is full of obstacle courses, good intentions that lead to hell, and roads less traveled. I wonder sometimes if we really like the good so much as we suppose because we follow what we think is the path full of hope. Often learning a lesson is a bitter experience, a very terrible experience. Suppose you fight through the supposed evil obstacle for what you think is the good you longed for only to discover that what you held in lofty esteem was a facade, a lovely porch but a doorway to emptiness and loss. You ignored the warning signs, writing them off as negative thinking. The pill you must swallow—the leap of faith you must take. But the pill is bitter and the leap is into the fire as Gollum dives for the Ring.

The food in the paradise-turned-prison becomes the very thing you can't eat, what you thought was a home for your heart turns out to be the place you can't live, and the comforter you dreamed of becomes the person that makes you comfortless.

The Promised Land in times before was ignored for this. The other way was full of giants. So, you chose a lesser god to serve and follow. But if you don’t face those giants it only leads to more compromise, more disillusionment. Finally, you realize that indeed no rescue is possible back to exile in Egypt. Bondage seems easier than facing the truth, those giants. But the last card has been played, the last domino has fallen.

I've been there when the world I wanted to love and cherish broke in my soul and appeared in my senses like a cosmic gut punch. It was the road I was on back to exile. I couldn’t go back and I couldn’t go forward. That state of existence had to go. I had to face the giants waiting for me. I tried to hope the bad away on the road I was on so I wouldn’t have to face the hard decision to face a future without my dream that I was trying to resurrect from the nightmare it had collapsed into. Oddly my sense of helplessness awakened and steadied me because I remembered…

Have you not known; have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary. His understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted, but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; and they shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint (Isaiah 40:28-31).

The struggle within over which road to follow ended when under the shouting within I cut the ties dragging me back to Egypt. I escaped that “paradise” but the pain of lost hope lingers and haunts me like a ghost. The decision to cut the ties did not lie with me but in the light of a hard lesson waiting to be learned from the God of my youth who was and is still faithful and patient, I was finally obedient to what God had been trying to tell me about the poison in my so-called paradise all along. Faith in His wisdom although it was a grievous pain to my being was the only true choice.