He Won’t

Everything in life will fail you at some point. It will all run out.

We fail each other in relationships, maybe not all the time, but from time to time we fail one another. Different relationships run their course, they run out, end. Everything we own will fail at some point, and then simply run out of steam and stop working. The clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the homes we live in. None of it will last.

I’ve broken favorite mugs, lost beloved items, killed treasured houseplants, because we even fail ourselves. And everything runs out. I’m always running out of bread, milk, salsa, shampoo, toothpaste, Kleenex, gasoline. You name a household staple, and I will be needing to buy more soon. For all our longing for stability and routine, we sure do live in a place that doesn’t last for long.

We try to convince ourselves change isn’t inevitable, we come up with slogans like “Ford — Built to Last” knowing full well cars don’t. We buy our children clothes that are slightly too big in hopes they will last. We try to keep time in a bottle, but even time marches on.

There is only one thing I have known in my life that has never failed. One thing that has never changed, never run out. One thing that has been a constant source of steadiness in my life, unwavering in a wavering world.

All my life God has been faithful. He has not changed. I realize 43 years in light of the whole history of mankind and all of eternity before us is just a barely a blip on the radar of time, but that’s where it becomes even more beautiful. He’s also been unchanging for generations. I can go back far into my family tree without finding a relative he’s not been faithful to. And it’s continuing in the generations after me. It’s enough to make me weep at the goodness of it all.

It can be hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that God will never change, that I will never reach the end of his love, his grace, his kindness. I’ve not known anyone else like him. As the song says, he’s been faithful for generations, so why would he stop now? He won’t.

Knowing him allows me to have a firm foundation in life, come what may. It’s the purest form of surety in life. He will not break. He will not run out. He will not fail. The longer I’m alive the more I know it to be true. The older I get the more in awe of him I am.

You can put your faith in politicians, governments, anti-establishments, communities, significant others, family, friends, your children, yourself. I’ve put my faith in those things at different times, but they’ve all failed me at points. The only one who has never failed is God.

As a child I loved God. I grew up in church, my dad was a pastor. When I was 14, everything in my life failed. My parents divorced, my church split, my family fractured, and it was easy to look at it all and blame God. After years of living for myself, doing what I wanted, trying to find the stability in life that I knew as a child, I ended up in a church meeting. I went more out of desperation for community, to remind myself of better times, I didn’t really want to be there. But after that service, the question came — you say you’re miserable in life, that you’ve made a mess of it, why not give God an honest chance? I had no intentions of giving God an honest chance. Years of anger and bitterness roiled inside me. But I found I couldn’t deny that I had failed. In my feeble attempts to find happiness, I only found emptiness. I needed something solid to land on, and while I couldn’t imagine God would be what I was looking for, I figured what did I have to lose. So, I decided to give it six months, if I didn’t see any differently after that time I was out, back to the search.

That was 22 years ago.

I found it. I still sometimes can barely believe it. I found the security I was looking for, I found the solid ground, I found the anchor I can cling to in the storms, the safe space in the chaos. I found the unchanging, the unfailing, the most faithful friend. I found the reason people can sing through cancer, dance through child loss, love through differences. I have never seen God fail. He proves himself over and over and over in not only my life, but in the lives of those around me.

He can do it for you too if you give him the chance.