If God is real, why doesn't everything autosave?
Sometimes suffering leads to much needed personal improvement
Some time ago, I was writing a sermon on Microsoft Word. The ideas were just flowing, and I was click-clacking away as the Spirit was flowing through me. I had my litany of commentaries open next to me and my multiple Bible Gateway tabs open to copy and paste Scripture from the version that my two semesters of Koine Greek led me to believe was most legit. I even had a form and function statement written at the top, the only things I ever put into practice after taking two Homiletics (the study of preaching) classes in my undergrad and graduate career.
I fleshed out quite a bit of the meat and potatoes before moving on to another task and closing my laptop.
There was just one problem: I hadn’t saved the document—I didn’t even bother titling it, apparently so caught up in the moment of sermon creation. And you guessed it. Later, when I went back, it was almost entirely gone, reverted to some early version where I had typed just a few lines. All that effort and research disappeared.
I spent an hour researching how to recover the lost data but realized that sometimes Word is just like “LOL, what if we don’t autosave everything?”
Eventually, I begrudgingly came to the conclusion that I had to start over. Almost from scratch. Despite already spending hours on researching and writing, creating something I was pretty proud of, I had to do it all over again.
But I had a sermon to preach the upcoming Sunday (yes, I’m a preaching procrastinator). It had to be written. I had no choice but to get to it—again.
Using what I could remember and imagining new connections I didn’t make before, I set out to recreate the sermon—pressing SAVE every 4.5 seconds. What came out on the other side was what I felt was one of the most powerful sermons I've preached to this day. I don't know if the congregation got anything from it, but the message tugged at my own heartstrings, and the words seemed to come together so eloquently in ways that were clearly not the work of humanly Jake Doberenz.
I learned an important lesson through what started out as incredible frustration.
My therapist once told me that suffering either expands or shrinks our souls. Either trials and tribulations make us grow in Christ, or they cause us to lose sight of God's design for our lives. Some people who hit rock bottom go "I know the person I need to become" while others reject the lesson embedded in the circumstance and end up spiraling to a worse place. Our "Job moment" can either make us more faithful to God, or it can just as easily drive us away into the darkness.
Describing this point, my therapist told me about some kid's show I never heard of. As a parent, he of course watches children's entertainment more than he'd likely care to admit. In one episode of this show, a kid's sandcastle got knocked down by the ocean's waves. He cried, but another character told him it was his opportunity to build a new sandcastle, an even better one.
And so he did. But it was also flattened by the waves. Yet, he persevered and built another one. The process kept repeating. By the end of the episode, the sandcastle the dude built was enormous. The suffering had given him the technical skills and likely the motivation to build an exquisite structure. I imagine that the waves couldn't easily pick a fight with this final fortress.
When suffering strikes, we have the choice to give up on the project. We can let our souls shrink, looking inward at fleshly desires, barricading our hearts from any transformation. We can sit and stew in the misery or wall off the emotions and pretend nothing happened—both options that prevent us from maturing as people.
Or—and I prefer this one—we can keep going. Try again. Go for round two. Persevere. This is exactly what the book of James teaches us, right from the beginning of the letter. He writes,
“Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”
-James 1:2-4
Trials, when persevered through, lead to maturation and completion. It's a recipe for Christian spiritual formation. Some translations of James 1 might even say that you will be “perfect.” But that word distracts from the real meaning. When the New Testament speaks of maturity, it's not about moral perfection, where you make no mistakes. It's about becoming fully aligned with God's vision for humanity. Jesus came to earth as both fully human and fully divine at the same time, and I believe Jesus invites us to transform into that same mysterious combination. It's just that for us, the human part is in the driver's seat while so often the divine, the will of God, is in the trunk.
Trials, as horrible as they are, can crash the car, allowing us to take stock of things and fully realize that God is a better driver. As Carrie Underwood might say, "Jesus, take the wheel!"
My sermon got better because I was forced to start again, and this time I really relied on God to help me meet that looming Sunday deadline! Likewise, the sandcastles in the kid's show constantly improved despite the outside forces because the creator didn't let the waves win but learned from each experience. Every affliction thrown at us is a chance to grow our character or a chance to abandon it.
Giving up in suffering means you don't get to see how the book ends, so you can never really know the full story. Persevering means we get to be transformed by seeing the whole story laid bare. Be careful that you don't let your soul shrink, which is painful and awkward but much more rewarding.
Question of the Week
Leave your answer in the comment section below or reply to this email.
How can we persevere during trials and suffering?
My “Goings On”
I also went to my first book signing in a multi-author event at the oldest and largest independent bookstore in Oklahoma.
I was also on a panel on the Future Christian podcast to talk about artificial intelligence in the Church: https://futurechristian.podbean.com/e/ai-and-the-church/
Let’s suffer better,
Jake Doberenz
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Nice article about God not autosaving everything! In reply to your question, "How can we persevere during trials and suffering?", here's a post I made. It's not a complete answer, but it might help: https://fantasticfaith.substack.com/p/steadfast