For my 16th birthday I went to the London Dungeons with some friends. There's one part where they're displaying medieval surgery. So I'm engrossed as they pull bloodstained intestines from the dummy as my friend murmurs "I'm going to faint". Next thing I know she's lying on the floor and has made a very loud crack on the way down as her head bounced of the wooden barrier. Like a sensible person and good friend I called for help and took control of the situation. Did I heck. Instead, I chose to poke her aimlessly saying, "Harriet, stop messing around. What are you doing? Get up!" In fact, it took someone on the OTHER SIDE of the room to notice and actually call for help. So what can we take from this? Well, firstly it's obvious one should never faint around me, or indeed have any medical emergency. Secondly, and most importantly though, we can learn that as humans we don't always make the best decisions or have the right answer to a problem.
We mess up. We make mistakes. We decide that self harm is the best way to deal with pain. We decide that drinking will solve all our problems, or at least allow us to forget them for a while. We decide that throwing up our food will make us feel prettier, be more accepted.
People have made mistakes since right back in biblical times. In 2 Kings 6-7 we see a people desperate as a result of a severe famine. But rather than turning to God, they're trying to help themselves:
"This woman proposed that we eat my son one day and her son the next. So we cooked my son and ate him. Then the next day i said, 'kill your son so we can eat him,' but she had hidden him." -2 Kings 6:28-29
Now obviously, eating your children is never going to be a good solution to a famine. But it was the only man made solution available. The people were desperate and the situation seemed hopeless. Then God intervenes. He makes the nearby army here the sound of chariots so that they flee, and then he sends in four lepers (another amazing example of God using the broken to save his children) to discover the food.
"So it was true that five quarts of fine flour were sold that day for half an ounce of silver, and ten quarts of barley grain were sold for half an ounce of silver, just as the Lord had promised." -2 Kings 7:16
We can take the same moral from this story, human solutions are often inadequate, but God has the answer. If we look to ourselves for security we end up with cannibalism and aimless poking. If we look to God, we end up with Jesus. The ultimate solution.
It's all very well saying that God intervened there. But the baby was still eaten. It might seem he intervened too late. I missed out an important bit of my confession. The alley the guy led me down, was outside a church. It was a church wall I was raped against. I spent months torn apart by both guilt and anger. "It was outside your house God and you didn't stop it".
But the bible tells us :
"We are hunted down but God never abandons us. We get knocked down but we get up again and keep going, Through suffering, these bodies of ours constantly share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies" - 2 Corinthinans 4:10
God doesn't force his intervention on us. If we want to go our own way, make our own mistakes he'll leave us to it. But when things fall apart and we turn back to him he's instantly there. He never abandons us. Then good things can blossom from the ashes of our mistakes.
We are safe in his arms. Things still go wrong, we still get bashed about a bit by the world. But the promise was never that life would be easy, the promise was that God would always be with us. God's solutions are good, God's solution is Jesus.
" The LORD watches over you, the LORD is your shade at your right hand; the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. The LORD will keep you from all harm, he will watch over your life; the LORD will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore. " -Pslam 121: 5-8
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