God Remembers

But God remembered Noah and all the beasts and all the livestock that were with him in the ark. And God made a wind blow over the earth, and the waters subsided. Genesis 8:1

In my addiction, I went to God, begging for miraculous transformation. I hated what I was doing but I was addicted and couldn’t stop. I felt that faith should be my get-out-of-addiction-easy card. So, I asked God to simply take it all away. He told me to go to treatment, confess, get help, and change my life. I refused to do any of those things and so I stayed stuck in my addiction. I had an expectation of how I thought God should work and when he didn’t do it my way, I became disillusioned. Why won’t you fix me? Are you even there? Have you forgotten about me?

God hadn’t forgotten about me. It’s just that his plan was very different from mine. I had expectations and when God didn’t meet those expectations, I became resentful. In my resentment, I accused him of abandoning me. I thought faith meant that God would magically make all my problems go away. Through my addiction though, I learned that faith meant believing in God and being obedient to his will, particularly when it’s contrary to my will. I didn’t get my instant miracle, but that didn’t mean God had forgotten about me. God remembered me and brought about the painful circumstances that convinced me to go to treatment, confess, get help, and change my life, taking me where he wanted me to go in the first place.

I’ve got to wonder if Noah felt like God forgot about him. Noah obeyed God, built the ark, and got all the animals into it. The rains came down and the floods came up. Then Noah waited . . . for 150 days. The passage doesn’t say that Noah knew the specifics of God’s plan, but I’d bet that Noah’s plan didn’t involve being stuck in the ark for five months. God, did you forget about us? But God remembered Noah . . . It may not have been Noah’s plan, but eventually, the flood receded, and God let Noah out of the ark.

This is hard for us. We go to God in our need, and we have expectations. God though, seems to rarely work exactly how we think he should. In our unmet expectations, we become resentful, which is absurd. God isn’t obligated to act according to our will. We mistakenly think that faith means God should do what we want, but through our trials, God teaches us that faith means believing in and following him, particularly when his plan is contrary to ours. God hasn’t forgotten us. His plan is just often very different from ours.