“Who will separate us from the love of Christ

“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?…No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:35,37-39; italics added).

I read a moving story this week by Frederick Buechner. I’d like to share it with you:

“I remember sitting parked by the roadside once, terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family, when out of nowhere a car came along down the highway with a license plate that bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then. The word was TRUST. What do you call a moment like that? Something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while? The word of God?…The owner of the car turned out to be, as I’d suspected, a trust officer in a bank, and not long ago, having read an account I wrote of the incident somewhere, he found out where I lived and brought me the license plate itself, which sits propped up on a bookshelf in my house to this day. It is rusty around the edges and a little battered, and it is also as holy a relic as I have ever seen.”

Reading this story brought to me a story of my own encounter with a trust officer in a bank. I was fortunate enough to have a father who set up a trust account for me so that when I went to college I could go wherever I wanted without giving thought to the need for money. Along with the trust fund came a trust officer with whom I regularly spoke regarding my college expenses. After graduation, I still had several thousand dollars left in this account because I lived sparingly, as least for the last two years of college. I was engaged at that time to a man named Justin who had to return to his hometown, Wake Forrest, North Carolina, to do an internship. I decided, against my better judgment, to move to Wake Forest as well. When I moved there, though, I didn’t have a job. In order to get an apartment, then, I had to pay seven months up front for it. This apartment was between seven and eight hundred dollars a month. If you do some quick math, paying seven months up front adds up to several thousand dollars. So, I called my trusty trust officer down in Alabama and asked him to forward the remainder of my trust fund into my account. I spent those last several thousand dollars on that apartment.

About one month later, as things were quickly disintegrating in our relationship, Justin came to me and said, “I don’t want you to go to seminary.” My response was a quick, “Well…then I don’t want to marry you.” It sounds so easy, but it broke my heart. Suddenly this future I had seen for myself was gone in a matter of a few seconds. At this point, I did have a job…with family friends of Justin. I decided it was time to go home. My lovely brother Jason came to Wake Forest, packed the moving truck for me, and drove me all the way down to Alabama…a drive I’m sure I could never have made on my own. I said goodbye to my apartment, an apartment for which the realty company would not return my several thousand dollars. An apartment into which Justin moved and lived for six months for free. I, on the other hand, was broke. Not just monetarily broke, but also emotionally and spiritually broken. Where was I supposed to go from here?

If you had asked me that day, or any day for the next 8 months or so, where I would end up, I would have given you “the glass is half empty” answer…as pessimistic an answer as you would have ever heard. If I had only remembered to trust in God, those eight months would have been so much easier.

I’m quite certain that no one else in this congregation has had the exact same experience, but I do know for sure that most, if not all, of you have had similar experiences. Those times in your life when you feel as though things cannot possibly get any worse. The light at the end of the tunnel does not seem to exist, and all you can see of the road in front of you is hopelessness. We’ve all been there.

Little did I know those eight months that it was only a short amount of time until I would meet the man of my dreams, to whom I am now married—a man who completes me in a way that I never dreamed possible. Little did I know that I would eventually end up in Chicago for two years, a time full of experience that matured me beyond my wildest imagination. Little did I know that I would eventually end up here in southern Maryland, and fall in love all over again, but this time with a whole congregation of people. Little did I know.

Think back to those times in your life, those hopeless times. Look at where you are now. Maybe you’re in one of those hopeless times. It always gets better, even if you cannot see any hope at all in the future. God has a plan for each of us, a plan he holds dearly in his heart. It’s not usually our plan for us. In fact, it’s often quite different. Those transitions from our plans to God’s plans can be quite painful. If we trust in God, though, perhaps those transitions won’t be quite so painful. After all, God is walking each painful step with us, hoping, praying, that we will trust in him, let him take over, let him lead us through the muck. But please, do not trust me when I say this. It’s not about trusting me. God tells us this. It’s about trusting God. Listen again to what God assures us through his apostle Paul: