I’ll never forget my first car accident. I was traveling at 45 mph when a driver in oncoming traffic turned left in front of me. I never saw it coming, so I didn’t make any adjustments. There wasn’t even time for me to hit the brakes. I suppose that’s the way it often is with accidents. If there had been some forewarning, we might have done something to avoid them. But sometimes you don’t have a clue – you’re minding your own business, doing nothing wrong, and you’re hit out of nowhere.
How can people avoid what they don’t know is going to happen? Ecclesiastes 8:7
Trauma comes in many forms, but it’s always a lot like a car accident. In just a moment, less than the blink of an eye, everything changes. You’re stopped in your tracks and where you thought you were going is no longer your immediate concern. Now you all you can focus on is getting from this exact moment to the next, and sometimes you wonder if you’re even going to make it.
Soldiers aren’t the only ones who deal with traumatic stress, and it doesn’t require a visit to a war zone to experience trauma. We have an enemy who is poised to bring the battle to us, who “prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8). His goal isn’t just to trip us up or make us have a bad day. His aim is to “steal and kill and destroy” (John 10:10). Trauma is one of the many tools he uses to derail us and he’d like nothing better than to keep us living in the wreckage.
There’s something in our culture that says we should rise above suffering and pain, that we shouldn’t let losses get to us. If we were doing it right, we would have an unphased, unaffected approach to life. But when we’re attacked, beaten up, plowed into, how are we supposed to do that? Sorrow is not the result of some failure or weakness. It’s the normal response to living in a fallen world. Things are not as they should be.
The question is, do we believe that they can be? The promise for the Christian is that one day they will be (Revelation 21:5). While we wish that ‘one day’ was today, Jesus said, “Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
Jesus knows firsthand the reality of trials and sorrow. But He doesn’t leave us there. He says we don’t have to lose our hearts over them because He has overcome all the hurt there could ever be in the world. Not erased it, but overcome it. So while there is pain, there is also comfort. Trauma doesn’t have to be the end of the story.
God does this thing where He takes an expected outcome and brings about something completely different. So although we understandably want to avoid sorrow, “sadness has a refining influence on us” (Ecclesiastes 7:3). Sorrow causes us to seek comfort. Weakness causes us to look for strength outside ourselves. So let it do its work. Let tears soften the soil of your heart. Let helplessness cause you to seek help. Let desperation draw you to the Savior. He has prevailed, and if He has, so will we.
As for me, I look to the Lord for his help. I wait confidently for God to save me, and my God will certainly hear me. Do not gloat over me, my enemies! For though I fall, I will rise again. Though I sit in darkness, the Lord himself will be my light.
Micah 7:7-8