Arrested Arrows

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Just in case you haven’t been paying attention lately, Texas has been going through a hellish heatwave. Here in San Antonio, our daily highs were over 100 degrees most of the month of June, I believe, and are on target to be so for the rest of the month of July. And y’all . . . August is still coming. Pray for your suffering brothers and sisters here in the South.

In light of this climatic insanity, I emailed my landlord the other day to thank him for replacing my A/C unit back in May. I had been holding my breath waiting for it to die since the day I moved in three years ago. I doubt it would have survived this craziness, and I don’t even want to THINK about sitting in this house in these temperatures with no air conditioning. My sister said the other day, “God was looking out for you,” and I think he was.

However, I have two friends whose A/C did go out last week in the middle of the wicked heat (and on the same day, oddly enough). At least one of these units was only a few years old, too, and had no business biting the dust at this time when its services were most required. Bless my sweet friends’ hearts . . . I was aching for them, sweating through a couple of sweltering days like that.

But this begs the question: if my A/C being replaced in time for the heat wave was evidence of God “looking out” for me . . . was God not looking out for my two friends? Why did I get that blessing and they didn’t?

While we’re moving in this challenging direction, let me point something else out: each of these friends has a strong, loving marriage that has lasted a couple decades or more. There’s a blessing they got that I missed out on.

And I don’t point that out to be sassy or to invoke pity or to make this some bizarre kind of blessing competition. There was a big backlash against the “#blessed” hashtag a while back, and this exemplifies why. Why does this good thing that happened to you make you #blessed? Are others not so #blessed? If you just mean that you’re grateful, would you still be grateful if you were less #blessed?

Many years ago, I attended a Bible study for a very short time when we were living in St. Louis. I remember almost nothing about this study except a story a woman shared. She was going through some huge trials in her life at the time and really struggling with where God was in all of it. But one week, she shared with us all a dream she had had the night before.

She was huddled in a ball on the ground with her face hidden, and arrows were coming at her. One every few seconds. An arrow hit her arm. Then another struck her leg. And she was sobbing to God, angry that he wasn’t stopping the arrows from coming. But then she lifted her head for a moment . . . and she suddenly realized that there were actually hundreds of arrows flying at her from all directions. There was some kind of invisible force field around her that the arrows were bouncing off of. Every once in a while, one would get through and hit her -- again, in an arm or leg or some other place that hurt but didn’t do significant damage. But hundreds and hundreds of arrows that should have been striking her dead were falling to the ground harmlessly all around her. 

I am quite certain God had me at that otherwise forgettable Bible study just so I would hear about that dream . . . because it has stuck with me for three decades. I am completely unaware of the shield God has around me and the threats it has intercepted. “A reckless car ran out of gas before it ran my way,” Amy Grant sang many years ago. Surely there have been many such cars and other such bullets that I have dodged over the years -- a whole mess of dangers God has protected me from of which I am blissfully ignorant.

I have no idea why my friends were hit by the dying A/C arrows and I was not. I have no idea why they were protected from the dying marriage arrow and I was not. This is simply reality. She gets this good stuff – he gets other good stuff. I got these problems – y’all got other problems. I don’t think it’s a question of what we each could handle; I suspect it’s a matter of how the Lord could use each attack in our lives.

So, I’m resisting the temptation to look for the why. I may never know the why, and that’s okay. I trust that God only lets an arrow through because he intends to grow beautiful things from the wound where it lands. 

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