Today in church, our children's pastor preached a sermon titled "The God of Do-Overs". She used the example of getting back on track after something didn't go well or looking back on the last year and thinking it didn't quite go as expected.
While the meat of the sermon focused on putting God first in our lives, trusting that He has our best interest in mind and heart, and that He's not done with us yet (all fine and dandy), I couldn't help but feel a little disagreement with the sermon's title. When I think of a "do-over" I think of going back to before something happened and making different choices to yield a different outcome. Dictionary.com backs me up by defining "do-over" as "a chance to redo an action". Thankfully I don't feel that in 2012 my life held any events that I'd rather it didn't, but I can identify a few things from earlier years that could fall into the "not so awesome" category. However, I don't wish to do them over. They may have been hard, painful, and ugly but God took my sorrow and turned it to laughter. He took my weakness and gave me strength. God was able to deliver good out of each terrible thing that happened. Would I still have received those blessings if the icky things didn't happen? Would I understand joy and endurance if I had never felt despair and defeat?
As God's children, are we ever really off track? If God is truly not done with us yet, like Philippians 1:6 says, isn't it all just a part of the process? Maybe we don't need to get back on track or do over, we just need to keep going forward. We don't heal from pain so that we can forget our hard times. We heal so that we can become more whole, be more intimate with God.
