A Thought For The Week Of February 29, 2016

"Leah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Reuben, for she said, “It is because the Lord has seen my misery. Surely my husband will love me now." (Genesis 29:32) Desperate yearning. That's what I thought of as I read the story of Leah. Leah was in a very sad situation. Jacob had been tricked into marrying her - and, really, nothing in the wider story suggests that Leah wanted to marry Jacob. So she was in an arranged marriage to a man who loved her sister (and his second wife) far more than he loved her - if he loved her at all. And all she yearned for was a husband to love her. And she kept taking that yearning to God. How many of us do that? We get desperately unhappy about something and we go to God with it and ask for relief. I think it's a universal experience - at least among people who believe in God. And we often get frustrated or angry because we think that God doesn't answer our prayers - but what we really mean is that God doesn't answer our prayers in the way we want them answered. Leah's yearning and her repeated (3 times) plea to God was that her husband would love her. I'm reminded here of Paul's thorn in the flesh - three times, he says, he asked God to remove it. Neither Leah nor Paul got what they asked for - but they both in a sense got the same thing. Suffering through their desperate yearning, both finally realized that in the midst of what they were suffering, God was present. Paul discovered God's strength; Leah came to the point of praising God. Both understood that whatever hardships they had and whatever they were facing, God had not abandoned them; God was there. That's a powerful lesson for all of us. It's easy to face hardship and decide that God has given up on us - so that we, then, give up on God. But eyes of faith are able to see beyond our immediate troubles and circumstances and understand that God is with us through it all - strengthening us to keep going, and loving us all the way through.