…Trust Him through Tragedy
// by Amy Boyle
I didn’t decide to be displaced. Who does?
Which of us wants a life with more suffering?
If given the option to forgo the cross, I think most people would prefer to, but not because we despise who hardship has made us into. Rather, we know that our obedience in enduring what we would not have chosen is where we witness God’s handiwork in a wonderful way.
And we can find comfort in knowing we are not alone or mistaken in wanting God’s will without the price of our life spilled out. Christ Himself pleaded with his Father in Gethsemane, saying “if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39).
Following Jesus comes with crucifixion, and we likely won’t get to choose the cup we’re called to drink from. But if it’s Living Water that we long for, the taste will not satisfy us until we first endure the pain and pressing of leaving the “life” we used to live, in order to take up the cross we’re called to carry (Matthew 16:24-26).
Scarcely would someone choose the circumstances and conditions that have caused them considerable pain, yet that suffering is precisely the substance which shapes them into who they have become.
My portion? I didn’t choose the cup of displacement… the bitter taste of wondering what “home” is and which people to call my own isn’t a cross I wanted to carry.
And I am certainly not alone, because neither have the millions of nameless, faceless, image-bearers of God, who are wandering in foreign lands, waiting for someone else to make a decision that will shape the trajectory of their lives.
The UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) estimates that today, 1 in 67 people are experiencing forcible displacement in the world. More than 115 million people are actively suffering from conditions and conflicts in and around the country they call “home.” I lived alongside a portion of this population for a time.
Foreigners—forcibly displaced asylum-seekers from countries around the world, living on Samos (an island in the eastern region of Greece), awaiting outcomes out of their hands. The reality undid indifference in me.
Jesus was a refugee… a baby living at the mercy of men in power whose decisions had considerable implications for what he’d come to endure.
I pray God helps me to remember that.
It may not be persecution or threat of death, but each of us have plot points in our life that have left us feeling displaced.
Whether due to things we have done, or those that others have done to us, we don’t need the status of “refugee” to be familiar with the feeling of being forced to flee.
Two decades ago, others’ made a decision for me as a baby. That choice has forever changed my understanding of “family,” “home,” and “country.” Now, who could say whether I would have chosen it or not… belonging to a family whose faces don’t resemble my own. Regardless, it is the reality I have been given to embrace.
The displacement of this isn’t a daily palpability, but it’s cutting when people with good intentions assume I’m always appreciative of being adopted. Is there room for considering the context and grieving what went “wrong” in the process?
Am I to appreciate the conditions of a country that compelled two strangers to abandon me as an infant, for me to belong to a new family?
Am I to praise God for placing me with parents whose personalities and pastimes greatly differ from my own?
Am I to thank God that at least I’m not an orphan anymore, even if the trauma lingers as part of my past and story that I can never separate myself from?
Displacement wasn’t my choice. It probably wasn’t yours either.
And I don’t believe God expects us to be grateful for what grieves us… those tragedies that have displaced us, even as they’ve shaped us into who we are today.
Whether we are the sojourner crossing dangerous seas, the single mom of three begging God for just enough to make ends meet, the student struggling to see their worth beyond letters on a screen, or simply wondering where God wants you to be… this remains true—he knows you.
We can live ready to trust the One who trailblazed tragedy, “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). His sufferings have redeemed our pain and pressing, into the very substance where bitter becomes sweet.
Surely, we all bear cups we didn’t ask for and probably wouldn’t have chosen, yet those unwanted storylines are precisely where the Author invites us to “taste and see” his goodness even in our grief (Psalm 34:8).