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Ultimately, we are citizens of heaven, and we eagerly await a Savior from there. But meanwhile, in the shadowlands, we walk by faith and not by sight. Meanwhile (ambiguous word, that: meanwhile: in the mean place, the between place, the unfair place), those who walk by faith discover that life rarely gets easier. It often gets harder. Safe? Who said God was safe? Fair? Who said God was fair?

The holy wild is wilderness. But if you walk and don't faint, you find what Job did—though he slay me, yet will I trust him. You find that the God who walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death is infinitely better than the dull, safe god who lulls us on borderland, seducing us with false comforts, spinning a cocoon around us that doesn't protect, only entraps, and from which we emerge wingless.

Bonnie, Kaitlyn's mother, again:

God is doing a mighty work through this little girl. Why she has to be sick for it to happen is not for me to understand. All I know is that out of her life Jesus Christ shines. And those that dare to get close to her can't help but see it. "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it" (John 11:4).

Life isn't fair. But for those who live by faith—Abel and Abraham, Kaitlyn and Bonnie—it is well, it is well with their souls.

Mark Buchanan is pastor of New Life Community Baptist Church in Duncan, British Columbia. This article is excerpted from Your God is Too Safe: Rediscovering the Wonder of a God You Can't Control (2001) and is used by permission of Multnomah Publishers Inc.

Copyright © 2001 by the author or Christianity Today International/Christianity Today magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Christianity Today.

Commentaries on these verses from John Calvin, Matthew Henry, and others are available at the World Wide Study Bible, part of the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Earlier Christianity Today articles by Mark Buchanan include:

Jesus Wept | God's love, mercy, passion, grief, and anger are chiseled down to two words. (Mar. 6, 2001)

Benefit of the Doubt | The disciple Thomas reveals an important truth about faith. (Apr. 7, 2000)

Running with Jonah | Do we really want to be closer to God? (Nov. 3, 1999)

Stuck on the Road to Emmaus | The secret to why we are not fulfilled. (July 12, 1999)

Trapped in the Cult of the Next Thing | If ever there was a cult that gave us stones when we asked for bread, this is it. (Sept. 6, 1999)

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April 23 2001, Vol. 45, No. 6