Trusting the Author of the Story

By Matt Cobb

Trials Were Never Promised to Be Easy

There are moments in life when the story takes a turn that we never saw coming. A phone call. A diagnosis. A hospital room. 

A moment that divides life into before and after.

Recently, a dear friend of mine experienced a spinal cord injury and is now facing a season of paralysis that we are praying will be temporary. It is one of those circumstances that makes you remember just how little control we actually have over the stories we are living. And if I’m being honest, I hate this chapter. I hate that my friend is having to go through something so difficult. I hate the uncertainty. I hate that there are questions we cannot answer and timelines we cannot control. I hate being helpless to aid someone who has loved my family and me so well over the years. 

But I keep coming back to something I believe deeply:

God is still writing the story.

We spend so much of our lives trying to understand the individual chapters that we forget we are not the author. We see today. God sees the whole story.

One of the things I appreciate about Scripture is that it never pretends that the suffering in our stories is easy. James tells us to consider it joy when we face trials, but he doesn't say that the trial itself is joyful. He says that the testing of our faith produces perseverance. 

Paul writes something similar in Romans 5:

“Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” Romans 5:3–4

That is a remarkable progression. The Bible doesn't tell us that suffering is good because it feels good. It tells us that God can use suffering to produce something in us that could not have been produced otherwise. And maybe that's an important distinction; we don't have to call a painful thing good in order to believe God can bring good from it.

We Don't Have to Understand Every Chapter

Sometimes the hardest part of a trial is the uncertainty. We want answers. How long will this last? What will recovery look like? Why did this happen? What happens next? 

But faith doesn't always give us answers to those questions. Sometimes faith simply gives us somewhere to stand while we wait. 

In 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, Paul writes this,

“Therefore we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, yet our inner self is being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory that is far beyond comparison. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

Paul reminds us that what we see is temporary, while what we cannot see is eternal. That doesn't mean our circumstances aren't real. They are. The pain is real. The fear is real. The uncertainty is real. But there is more happening than what we can see.

Think about the greatest stories you've ever read. If you opened a novel halfway through, you might find a character sitting in the middle of a terrible situation. You might wonder how the author could possibly get them out of it. But the character doesn't know what you know. The character only knows the page they're on. The author knows the ending.

That's where I find comfort in God. I don't know what the next page looks like for my friend. I don't know what recovery will look like. I don't know how this chapter will end. But I know the Author. 

Maybe the Most Beautiful Stories Have Difficult Chapters

Some of the most beautiful stories aren't beautiful because nothing bad happened. They're beautiful because of what happened through the hard parts. The people who showed up. The prayers that were prayed. The strength that appeared when there shouldn't have been any left. 

God doesn't always immediately change the circumstances. Sometimes He changes us in the circumstance. He teaches us to depend on Him in ways we never would have learned otherwise. And sometimes, in ways we may not understand until much later, He takes a chapter we would have never chosen and somehow makes it part of a story far more beautiful than we could have imagined.

For my friend, we are praying for healing. We are praying for strength. We are praying for miracles. And we are praying for the kind of peace that only God can provide when the answers aren't here yet. He is, after all, the Great Physician. 

But most of all, we are reminding ourselves that this is not the end of the story.

It's a chapter. A really hard chapter. A chapter none of us would have chosen. But a chapter nonetheless. And the Author hasn't put down the pen. Maybe that's what faith looks like sometimes. Not knowing what happens next. Not understanding why the page looks the way it does. Just trusting the One who does.

If God is the Author, then we can take heart knowing that the story is not finished yet. And sometimes the most beautiful stories are the ones where, somewhere in the middle of the darkest chapter, we discover just how faithful the Author has been all along.