Heart Check: Whom Have I in Heaven but You?

Written by Justin Smiley

Two verses have swirled through my mind for the last 8 months or so. They’re the kind of verses that have come to mind in a “God, let this be the case for me” sort of way (as Pastor Lawrence described, trying to let the scripture master me and not vice versa), and one verse seems to compliment and solidify the other.

1 John 2, “Do not love the world or anything in the world for when/if you love the world, the love of the father is not in you”

Psalm 73, “Whom do I have in heaven besides you, and earth has nothing that I desire besides you”

After months of trying to let these scriptures “master my heart” I came up against an obstacle one afternoon; an acute experience of worldly grief and suffering. The grief and suffering came from a familiar source; a chronic and painful genetic condition that my wife has lived with every day for the last 9 years. The conditions around this particular experience of grief were not generally new: We were discussing how she would likely end up needing to use a wheelchair full-time regardless of which medical route we took, and that (barring God stepping in in a miraculous “parting the seas” sort of way), she would never realize her dream of being a mother in any capacity. It was the afternoon of yet another Mother’s Day that these difficulties confronted my heart with fresh insistence.

Even in the midst of this realization, I was (and still am) convinced that this world and this life mean nothing to me apart from accomplishing whatever God has purposed it for. So the question that afternoon was: Do I really mean what I say? Is the 1 John 2 and Psalm 73 passage really what is in my heart when the grief and the pain puts my heart and mind in such imminent distress? 

It’s not that I was previously hoping for some kind of worldly “success story.” Both Meg and I have been shown time and again that God is able to work His purposes through the suffering and through the loss of worldly things. He has shown us his Truth, which goes beyond the surface-level worldly lie that material comfort is required for joy and blessing. To borrow Pastor Ben’s verbiage from a recent sermon, the world (even Christians sometimes) often interprets blessing like a line graph:

On one hand: Material abundance = blessing, God’s favor, joy (arrow up and to the right)

On the other: Pain, discomfort, or being tested = being cursed, lack of “blessing,” season without joy (arrow down)

However, we’ve repeatedly experienced that the “arrow up” hallmarks can often actually make it more difficult to only place our hope in the Kingdom of God. 

While God does care about our struggles on earth, these worldly blessings are not always what’s good for us or “blessings” at all, as our hearts are easily beguiled by the security of worldly things, instead of practicing daily dependence on our Creator. God has shown me how easily beguiled my own heart can become by worldly successes - and that the moment that any worldly comfort dulls the edge of my keen dependence on our Creator, it is no longer truly a blessing to my soul. — So if my heart isn’t on these worldly things, why is my heart still troubled, and how does God respond to my anxieties?

Thankfully, Jesus himself actually empathizes with our worries about these things. He does not tell us to transcend the suffering, by meditating or breathing through the suffering to see past the illusion of the physical world. He enters straight into this world and these burdens right along with us! When he arrives to heal Lazarus as recorded in John 11, he weeps because Lazarus died from his illness. Jesus shows up with the express purpose of healing Lazarus, but before he simply goes about the healing or raising back to life, Jesus also mourns the very real loss. And he weeps, probably knowing that Lazarus is about to be alive later that day!!  

Jesus shows intentionality in coming alongside us in the “in between;” in these spaces in our lives where we experience real difficulties and do not yet see His purposes. He relates to us not only in emotional burdens, but to losses related to family (Matthew 12), loss of comfort and home (Matthew 8, Luke 9) and also to the immediate, demanding, bodily reality of suffering. So, when I idealistically spur myself on by remembering that this life is only to prepare us to participate in the Kingdom of Heaven, I can know that Jesus still empathizes with and validates  my grief. A friend recently said, “it actively sucks, but it’s also ok.” God validates our pains and our fears of both the known and the unknown, for every bit of “the suck.” The idealist in me is encouraged by the realist. Because the most real of any realist perspective will ultimately come to rest in the factual, historical, redemptive person of Jesus, and on his promise of redeeming all of creation. And like Lazarus’ sister anointing Jesus with perfumed nard, emptying what’s very likely her most valuable possession in an act of worship, the most appropriate response of ours is that we too worship him with the most valuable thing we have entrusted to us. What have we been entrusted with? A body, a soul, and a lifetime. Let us worship and serve Him urgently.