REDEMPTION

At my Care Group on Sunday night, after hearing Troy's message and the stories that people shared about God coming through when it looked like things were falling apart, Tim, who is in my group, asked a question. You know those questions that haunt you and won't leave you alone until you've obsessed over them for three weeks? It was one of those questions. He asked if when we talk about God working good things out of bad situations (like Troy and others were talking about) it is the same thing that non-Christians are talking about with things like Karma or Fate? It was a question that I don't think there is an easy answer to. It certainly sounds the same, or a least similar to talk about God showing up and things working out when we didn't think they would. Maybe people who believe in karma and fate really believe in an over-simplified and incomplete piece of the same thing that we do. But that idea troubles me. I don't want to believe in some sort of vague hope that things will work out. I want a God who enters into my pain and walks through it with me. Whether or not things work out, I want to believe that it's worth living in a world where the apple-cart gets spilled, if only because God is there with me.
As I've reflected on Tim's question, I've come to see that what we were really talking about on Sunday was Redemption, not Karma. Karma, or fate, or whatever you want to call it, is only concerned with restoring something to the place it was in before. But Christ is not in the business of karma; Christ is in the business of redemption. Redemption is not simply a restoration of original balance. Redemption picks up the things that are out of balance, the shattered fragments of a broken life and builds a mosaic or a tapestry out of them. Redemption builds a work of art more beautiful than anything that we could have imagined before things came crashing down. This is possible because Christ Jesus (a personal, loving God manifest in human flesh and not an impersonal, vague force like karma) enters into the dirt of what we are going through and bears the worst of it for us. That is the Christmas story. Jesus comes to be with us, takes on the very worst of who we are and what we do, and turns all of it to glory.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that pain will never affect you because you are a Christian. Sometimes, it might not even come to the place where you can see the good in the pain at all. But God is There. And He is in the business of redemption. Have you experienced redemption? Does any of this ring true for you or do you see things in a different way? I'm interested to hear other perspectives on this, so let me know what you think.