Things To Come

Yet what we suffer now is nothing compared to the glory he will give us later. For all creation is waiting eagerly for that future day when God will reveal who his children really are. Against its will, everything on earth was subjected to God's curse. All creation anticipates the day when it will join God's children in glorious freedom from death and decay. For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And even we Christians, although we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, also groan to be released from pain and suffering. We, too, wait anxiously for that day when God will give us our full rights as his children, including the new bodies he has promised us. Now that we are saved, we eagerly look forward to this freedom. For if you already have something, you don't need to hope for it. But if we look forward to something we don't have yet, we must wait patiently and confidently.

And the Holy Spirit helps us in our distress. For we don't even know what we should pray for, nor how we should pray. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words.
- Romans 8:18-26, nlt

I was surfing through some of the blogrolls on other sites, and discovered Unleaded Bread. Good stuff - I like to read people who like to write, who are struggling with the words to describe what's going on, who appear to be honest and forthright with their problems and triumphs. In this post, Andy writes about how he wanted to tell his son that everything will be okay, but more importantly he probably wanted God to tell himself that everything would be ok. Life has lots of junk - death, broken hearts, pain - and in the midst of all that, He is still God. And his reference to Rom. 8:18-26 was spot on for me this morning, too. Any struggle, any hardship or angst or crap-of-life, is worth it if it's leading to the real and transforming revelation of Christ and His glory in this place... right?