Unexplainable: The Bible as Applied to Two Ordinary Lives

By Faith Zember

The first book in a three-part series, this study will help answer questions such as:
• Can joy and sorrow coexist?
• What is the meaning of life?
• Is there a guidebook for the journey this side of Heaven?

Rich foundational core principles are covered in this study. Biblical topics include:
• Grief and loss
• The promise of Heaven
• Trials and pain
• Forgiveness
• Sexual purity and principles of waiting
• Tithe and God's providence

About the book:
Have you ever inadvertently stepped outside yourself, even if for a moment, silenced in awe?

In that quiet instance, when taken aback by the brief, yet profound awakening, your confidence in forever soared. Brimming with the foreknowledge of more – what is yet to come. In these pinhole experiences of life, the simultaneous presence of both flesh and spirit become temporarily understood. The coexistence of the supernatural, amidst the ordinary, natural life around you is illuminated. As if provisionally removed from the body, the heightened sense of spirit is palpable.

In the pages that follow, the Bible will come alive. What once may have seemed out of reach, will easily be within your grasp. Technicolor radiance will replace the once monochrome drudgery of reading Scripture. These chapters will draw you deeper and more ravenous for the Word.

The six short-story studies will lead you to mountaintop summits and accompany you amidst the deepest of sorrowful valleys. Your path will be illustrated with the vastness of God's beauty in the coexistence of grief and elation, sorrow, and joy.

Together we voyage familiar territory, grounds upon all can relate. The application of scripture ignites a thirst for more. The stories reveal God's radical truth juxtaposed with the gentle simplicity they are rooted in. And as you read, He, being the good, good Father, will generously deliver His peace, His hope, and His joy in abundance.

Unexplainable, the Bible as applied to two ordinary lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9780578805108

Book preview

them.

01

BROAD STROKE

your reward will be great

– LILY KELLY

In loss, we experience the stinging pings that smite, forced to birth the new rancid loathsome reality – inevitable, yet always received as surprising misfortune.

We are mere mortals; we know death is sheltering in the shadows just beyond the horizon. Unsuspecting, we behave when it strikes. Bewildered by the assault on our unassuming status quo that has previously been taken for granted, assumed to remain inevitably forever – despite the warnings.

However, it is irrational – the mystifying confusion is illogical. We have been warned, our temporalities are fully comprehended upon arrival here on earth.

We pray for long, lavish lives, fine health, and good fortune. But we know it is not promised. Though we do not admit it, instead pretending ignorance, but should expect hardships, pain, and loss. Our call Home is ever imminent.

You know quite well that the day of

the Lord will come like a thief in the night.

1 THESSALONIANS 5:2 NLT

But of that day and hour no one knows,

not even the angels of Heaven, but My Father only.

MATTHEW 24:36 NKJV

The time is near.

REVELATION 22:10B HCSB

Your eyes saw my unformed body;

all the days ordained for me were written in Your book

before one of them came to be.

PSALM 139:16 NIV

CS Lewis addresses our ill-conceived belief in life without hardship, pain, and loss in On Living in an Atomic Age (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. How are we to live in an atomic age? I am tempted to reply: Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents."

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb [our end] when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs [death]. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they [loss and death] need not dominate our minds."

Illustration

Is it possible that we simply wash over the realities of life and its delicate finite timeframe?

Do we broad stroke over life, as if an artist delicately dabbing their brush into the pigment, then taking it – in one grand sweeping wash of the canvas, hitting only the high points, overshadowing – completely missing and ignoring – the lowest depths in the valleys below? We underscore with generous overt enthusiasm each of these pinnacle events. The majestic bliss-capped-peaks rise as a phoenix from the shrouded commonplace whose sorrows lurk within its gusty vale. We so easily forget that from between each summit experience, the sorrows of life’s pain emerge.

Upon loss, we speak of what will be missed – the invitation no longer extended to marry or produce offspring. Lily will never get her driver’s license, finish high school, attend, and graduate college.

I will never get to take her for her driver’s license test, celebrating with her as she takes over the wheel to drive us the return route home. What joy I would have as she begins to slowly venture from the safety of our little burrow, where she has securely nestled all her life, to begin migrating on her own. How enchanting that would have been.

I will never get to pack her up, make the trek to school, to drop her off at her college dorm, stopping first to purchase a few things to make it ‘hers’, delighted to roam the aisles for her necessary staples of which she will require to maintain her new home away from home – to begin to go it alone as a young adult, leaving the nest.

I will never get to accompany her to choose a wedding dress, aiding to select the ‘just right’ one, standing behind her in awe of her simplistic natural beauty – now adorning her gentle curves, accentuating her purity, draped in exquisite white.

Think of all she is missing. Imagine all I will miss.

However, I must correct my thinking. She is not missing anything in this life. Indeed, she will not experience these mountain-top moments. But I must keep reminded, she will not be forced to endure the hardships and pains seeped, imbedded, and gripped within each valley stowed between every one of the bliss-filled high points of life here on earth.

She will not be tempted by the alluring freedoms of her youth while away at college. She will not experiment with substances that rob her inhibitions and steal her purity.

My precious girl will never have her heart broken. A boyfriend will never dump her. A husband will never leave her. She will never face divorce, separation, or infidelity. She will never fall victim to domestic abuse.

True, she will never have a child, nor me a grandchild. However, she will never know the sorrows of a miscarriage, or heartache of infertility.

We so easily forget the woes of this life when we experience new loss. Instead, we see only what fresh joys will never come, however leaving out the trouble that always remains yoked alongside each step in this life’s journey here on earth.

Illustration

Let’s imagine for a moment, that God actually spared Lily this life’s sorrows. Could that be? Is it possible that Lily’s call Home was a merciful, compassionate, and generous gift to her, a reward for a life well