a personal perspective from Joni
a personal perspective from Joni
The Lord took absolutely no pleasure in my broken neck. Like any father who has compassion on his children, God grieved to see me hurt. Yet at the same time, it pleased the Lord to permit my accident. My spinal cord injury was his sovereign design for my benefit and for his good pleasure.
How can this be? God’s ways are so much higher than ours. I once heard Dr. John Piper say that God has the capacity to look at the world through two lenses—through a narrow lens and a wide-angle one. When God looks at a painful event through a narrow lens, he sees the tragedy for the hurt it is. He is deeply grieved. God feels the sting when a child dies of cancer or a husband is killed in an accident. However, when God looks at that same event through his wide-angle lens, he sees the tragedy in relation to everything leading up to it as well as flowing out from it. He sees a mosaic stretching into eternity—it is this mosaic with all its parts that brings him delight.
© Pedro Talens Masip
When I was first injured, I was desperate to understand this. That’s when my friend Steve Estes showed me Lamentations 3:32–33, “Though he brings grief, he will show compassion, so great is his unfailing love. For he does not willingly bring affliction or grief to the children of men.” In the span of a single verse, the Bible asserts that the Lord brings grief, yet he does not willingly bring grief. True, God allowed my accident to happen, but he didn’t get a kick out of it—it gave him no joy. God tried this out on himself. He willed the death of his own Son, but he took no delight in it. God saw how Jesus’ death would demonstrate his incomprehensible mercy, as well as bring his people to glory. God often wills what he despises because—and only because—he has a wide-angle view on the world. As Steve once told me, “God permits what he hates, to accomplish that which he loves.”