Hello Darren
It is true that God works according to His timetable, Love and Wisdom.
Your Katrina experience feels exactly like what happened my family on the inside infrastructure of our being when God separated my husband from our son and I for an intense and deeply painful six weeks. How do you stop a Tsunami? How can anyone stop God? Why do any of us have to experience the absence of sovereignty over God Himself, through such intense trials and suffering? Because we are carnal and we have all to learn that…
"All the choices of all humanity are preordained by God to happen, and as such, not one is free to not happen. Therefore, no one has a will that can operate independent from or in opposition to, God’s preordained purpose." L. Ray Smith
God says, the BEGINNING of Wisdom, is the reverential fear of God meaning for me the realization that even in the most mundane or ordinary, even boring circumstances of our lives, or and including the intensely, insanely painful circumstances, God is STILL Sovereign appointing to us all of our circumstances and experiences. God doesn’t only rule in big issues. He is in the details too. I had to fall down stairs in the pouring rain to come up to God.
I have never experienced such deep surgery of God to my inner being. It was an inner Katrina.
We are being instructed by God who is making us whole in the knowledge and the experience that Paul testified…
Php 4:12 I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound. In everything and in all things I AM INSTRUCTED both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.
Quoting Ray from LOF 11……And it is this purification of the physical, carnal, temporal Adam, into the spiritual, holy, eternal Christ, that requires severe heat and pressure—a real life experience of overcoming EVIL with GOOD.
Here is the destiny of the whole human race:
“Now unto Him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you FAULTLESS [pure and perfect] before the presence of His GLORY with EXCEEDING JOY, To the only WISE God our Saviour, be GLORY and MAJESTY, DOMINION, and POWER, both now and ever. Amen” (Jude 24-25)….unquote
It is wonderful to know that our losses, sufferings and pain unto death, is in the charge and control of our God who Loves us and He is Faithful to His Word …
Rom 8:38 …… that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
Rom 8:39 nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
These are not just flowery feel good words of Paul’s sentimentality that are sung in tune to Church electric guitars and choir group. This is God talking and telling us that when and as He works in us making us into His Image, we shall start to understand what He, what God means as He takes us through the experience with heights, depths, powers, principalities and even death. As God takes you into His Hands to make you into His Image He shows you the meaning of the above!
Arc