The forest knowsthe wound you hide.

When the Wounds Remain If God is good, why do wounds remain? Pain can feel like evidence against love. Is it? I want to begin by saying that this is an honest question, and it deserves an honest answer. I am not going to pretend that pain is easy, or that a few tidy verses make the ache go away. Pain is real. Wounds are real. And there are seasons when they can feel like the strongest evidence we have that God is either not there, not good, or not paying attention. I have felt every one of those things. So let me not answer this from a distance, but from the middle of my own scars. Here is what I have come to believe after many years of walking with the Lord through both small wounds and unspeakable ones: pain is not proof that God does not love us. Very often, it turns out to be the very place where His love is proven. Not All Pain Is the Same The first thing worth noticing is that we do not actually treat all pain as evil. We only treat some of it that way. Think of the person who goes running before sunrise, lungs burning, legs aching. Think of the one who lifts weights until their muscles tear, on purpose, so that they can grow back stronger. Nobody drags them there. They choose that pain, willingly, week after week, because they can see what is on the other side of it. They can see the benefit clearly enough that the pain becomes worth it. Nobody looks at an athlete's discipline and says, "How cruel." So the problem is not always the pain itself. Very often the problem is that we cannot see what the pain is producing. We feel the burning, but we cannot see the muscle forming underneath. Scripture tells us that our trials are doing exactly that kind of hidden work. Peter says that the tested genuineness of our faith is "more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire" (1 Peter 1:7). Here is my honest guess: if we could see, even for a moment, just how much our trials are growing us, how they are forging a faith worth more than gold, a faith that will still be standing on the other side of eternity, I think we would choose them the same way the runner chooses the road. We would stop asking God to remove every hardship and start trusting the One who knows what He is building. The Thorn and the Comfort The apostle Paul knew this tension from the inside. He carried what he called "a thorn in the flesh," something painful enough that he begged the Lord three times to take it away. And the answer he received was not the removal he asked for, but this: "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). The thorn stayed. But so did the grace, and Paul came to say he would rather have the weakness with Christ's power resting on him than the ease without it. Then, just a few chapters earlier, Paul tells us something I have found to be profoundly, experientially true. He calls God "the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God" (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). Read that slowly. So much of our suffering unlocks a particular comfort from the Holy Spirit, a comfort we would never have known had we not first been in the affliction. And that comfort is not given only for us. It is given so that we can turn and hand it to someone else who is suffering in any way at all. Your wound becomes the exact shape of the comfort you can offer another wounded person. Pain, in the hands of God, stops being a dead end and becomes a doorway. The Refiner Who Never Looks Away The prophet Malachi gives us a picture I keep returning to. He says the Lord "will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver" (Malachi 3:3). If you have ever heard how silver is refined, you will understand why this comforts me. The refiner holds the silver in the fire, but he never walks away from it. He watches it closely, constantly, because if it is left in the heat too long it will be destroyed. He knows the precise moment to draw it out. That is our Father. He is not a distant God who lets us burn and forgets us. He is a loving Father who watches over every trial with the closest possible attention. He never allows anything so great that it would destroy us. And all the while He is refining, He is reminding us that the fire is not the end of the story, that ultimate comfort and joy are promised to us on the far side of eternity, where there will be no more thorns at all. Wounds That Become Monuments Here is where my own story comes in. For a long time I had a blood tumour on my nose. It was not pretty, and it was not pleasant. Time and time again it would swell up and grow, and then it would burst, releasing a great deal of blood. I went to a local skin specialist and had it cut out, but that only fixed things for a while. It seemed to be coming back with vigour. Then some friends at my Bible study prayed for me. And it was healed. Miraculously, completely healed. To this day there is a mark on my nose that does not quite look right. It is, in a manner of speaking, a wound. But it is a wound I would not trade for anything, because every time I catch it in the mirror it reminds me that the ultimate Physician reached down and healed me, for free, when the specialists could not. That little imperfection is not a scar of defeat. It is a monument of His faithfulness. Wounds that were once only painful have a way of becoming exactly that: standing stones that testify, God was faithful to me here. The Deeper Wound But I would be dishonest if I only told you about the small wounds. There is a far deeper one. When I was five years old, I watched my father be murdered in front of me. I will not pretend to fully understand why the Lord allowed that. But I can testify, over the long stretch of many years, to how He has met me in it, and even brought good out of a place I once thought was only darkness. He has answered my prayers and He has filled the blank spaces that loss carved into my life. First, He did this through His Word. In Psalm 68:5 He tells us that He is "Father of the fatherless." I want you to know that I am a living witness that this is completely, literally true. He has been a Father to me. And second, He meets me in the sadness itself. There are certain days when the grief still descends: Father's Day, or the anniversary of the day I lost him. On those days He does not stand back. He surrounds me and fills me with His presence, and in doing so He reminds me of something I now hold with everything in me: what my heavenly Father gives me can never, ever be taken away. Never Attribute to God the Work of Satan That deeper wound leads me to something I believe is one of the most important truths in this whole discussion, and I plead with you to hear it. We must never attribute to God the work of Satan. Jesus said it plainly: "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly" (John 10:10). There are two very different hands at work in this world. One comes to give life, and to give it to the full. The other comes to steal, to kill, and to destroy. For many years, whenever I considered the pain of losing my father, my heart would rage against God, if I even believed He was out there, or that He cared at all. But there was a possibility I had never once opened my mind to: that this gruesome act of murder was not the Father's doing at all. It was the work of the enemy. Murder does not come from the hand that gives abundant life. It comes from the thief. So, dear brother or sister in Christ, kindly and prayerfully assess the pain in your life. Sometimes, if we are honest, we dig our own holes and then fall headlong into them. Sometimes the Lord in His wisdom allows a pain that will genuinely grow us and help us in the long run, the way a refiner allows the fire. But never, never ever, hang around your Father's neck the pain that was bought by our hateful enemy. Do not blame the God who came to give you life for the destruction that came from the one who came to take it. Wounds Reflect the Wins I want to leave you with the picture that settles this whole matter for me. In the book of Revelation, we are shown the risen and reigning Jesus. He is victorious. He is glorified. And yet He still bears the marks of the nails. The scarred hands remain. Real wounds. Real pain was embraced to earn them; nothing about the cross was gentle. But those scars are not signs of defeat. They are the very sign of the most powerful victory that God has ever won. When we see the wounds in the hands of the risen Christ, we are not looking at evidence that love failed. We are looking at the proof that love conquered. So, does pain prove that God does not love us? I no longer believe that it does. If anything, the deepest wounds in history (His, and in their small way, ours) keep turning out to be the places where His love and His triumph are most clearly displayed. Wounds often reflect the wins.

Why Does God So Often Seem Hidden? If God wants to be found, why does He so often seem to be nowhere at all? I want to begin by admitting that I have felt the weight of this question more than once. There have been long seasons of my life when God seemed entirely absent, and years when I was not even sure there was anyone there to be absent in the first place. So let me say something at the outset that has taken me most of my life to learn. Hidden is not the same thing as absent. Those two words feel identical when you are in the dark, but they are not the same, and almost everything in this discussion turns on the difference. First, We Should Say Why the Distance Exists at All. We do not begin this conversation in a neutral place. We begin it east of Eden. In the garden, Adam and Eve walked with God. They knew His presence directly. Scripture tells us they "heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day" (Genesis 3:8). That is the picture of what we were made for: conversation, nearness, friendship, an unbroken relationship with our Maker. And then that same verse tells us what happened next. They hid. Notice carefully who hid first. It was not God who withdrew from man. It was man who ran from God, and the relationship was shattered from our side. This matters enormously, because it means the felt distance between us and God is not evidence of a cold or uncaring God. It is the wound left by our own sin. We cannot break something and then blame the One we broke it with for the pieces. If there is a veil between us and God, we must be honest that our hands helped hang it. Scripture Is Honest About This Feeling! Here is something that surprised me when I first noticed it. The Bible never pretends this feeling does not exist. It gives it words. Isaiah says it outright: "Truly, you are a God who hides himself, O God of Israel, the Savior" (Isaiah 45:15). Notice that hiding and saving sit in the very same sentence. The psalmist cries, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?" (Psalm 22:1). Job never receives the explanation he asks for. Again and again the Psalms ask God how long He intends to stay silent. If you have prayed something like that, you are not in rebellion. You are in the Psalms. God saw fit to put those words in His book, which tells me He is not offended by the honest ache of a heart that cannot find Him. Hiddenness Awakens a Longing Nothing Else Can Fill. There is something worth noticing about the very fact that people search for a God they cannot physically see. This world is genuinely beautiful. It can be enjoyed in a thousand ways, and I believe God intends for us to enjoy it. But it does not satisfy us. There is always something left over, some hunger that the best of this world cannot reach. People go looking for God anyway, in every culture and every century, which tells me our souls are longing for something this world was never built to supply. Paul told the philosophers in Athens that God arranged our times and places "that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us" (Acts 17:27). They are to feel their way toward Him. That is an honest description of what searching often feels like, and yet the verse ends by insisting He was never far away at all. The hunger itself is a signpost. If nothing here fills it, perhaps it was not meant to be filled here. Here is the picture that helps me ponder the divine hiddenness of God. Think of a teacher during an examination. He stands at the front of the room, quiet, while his students struggle over the questions. To a stranger walking past, he might look unhelpful, even indifferent. But every student in that room knows the truth. He is quiet now precisely because he has already taught them everything on that page. His silence is not there due to hatred or neglect of his students. It is the moment when what he has given them gets to become truly theirs. I have found this to be exactly how the Lord deals with me. When I am grappling with pain or hard circumstances and heaven seems quiet, I am reminded that God has already given me His Word. Time after time, when I have gone deep enough into Scripture, or pressed into the wisdom of other people who are filled with the Holy Spirit, I have come away with answers to the very thing I was wrestling with. So He is hidden, but He is not silent. He has spoken, and He is still speaking through His Word and through His people. Trials do not mean the Teacher has left the room. They are often the examination that shows what He has already built into us. Looking Back, I Can See the Hand I Could Not See at the Time This is where my own story comes in, and it is the part I most want you to hear. After I watched my father be murdered when I was five, life at home was hard. I had a stepfather who did not treat me well, and there were moments in my teenage years when things were so dark that I may even have wished to take my own life. Through all of it, I could not perceive that God was personally and intimately involved in my life. I could not see Him anywhere. If you had asked me then whether God was near, I would have said no. But I have the strange gift of hindsight now, and hindsight tells a different story. Looking back from the other side, I can see that His hand was over my life the entire time, steadying me when I did not know I was being steadied. Consider what happened when I was finally saved and able to look back honestly at my life. I had never done drugs. I had never been drunk. I had kept myself for my wife. I want to be very clear that this was not because I am some remarkably disciplined man who always wants to do the right thing. I know myself far too well to make that claim. That was the protecting hand of God over a boy who did not even know Him yet, guarding him through trials and temptations he had no strength to resist on his own. And in His timing, God removed me from that house and sent me off to Air School, which is precisely where I met His Son. So yes, God seemed hidden through the years of my pain. But He was not absent. He was holding me the whole way, and I simply could not see it until later. A Word to Anyone Who Is in That Dark Place Right Now. If you are reading this and you have thought about ending your life, or you are thinking about it now, please stop and hear me. Please reach out for help today. Tell someone. Speak to a pastor, a trusted friend, a family member, your doctor, or a crisis helpline in your country. Do not carry this alone and do not let it stay hidden. There are people who love you and who want to have a relationship with you, even when it does not feel remotely true. I want to say something else as gently as I can. One patch of life that is unbearably hard does not cancel out the goodness of God that came before it, and it certainly does not cancel out the goodness He has planned after it. It only feels that way because pain is loud and it fills the whole room. I am so deeply grateful that I did not take my life when I was fourteen or fifteen and everything seemed to be falling apart. If I had, I would have missed all of it. I would have missed my wife. I would have missed the work God has given me to do. I would have missed birding, and running, and a hundred ordinary joys that I could not have imagined from inside that darkness. And I am certain the Lord still has good things ahead for me to enjoy that I cannot see from here either. You cannot see them yet from where you are. That does not mean they are not there. Please stay, and please tell someone today. Jesus endured the hiddenness of God so that we never will (at least in an ultimate fashion) There is one more thing to say, and for me it settles the whole question. If you want to know what it truly means for God to turn away, do not look at your hardest season. Look at the cross. Jesus, hanging there, cried out with the words of that very psalm: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). This was not confusion. This was the Son bearing the actual, full, unmediated rejection that our sin deserved. The Father turned His back, and Jesus endured a hiddenness deeper than anything you or I will ever be asked to walk through. Sit with why He did it. He absorbed that abandonment so that it would never fall on us. What He endured on that cross purchased for you and me an eternity of knowing God as our Father. That is a beautiful and wonderful thing, and it means that the felt hiddenness we experience is temporary, survivable, and never final. Because ultimately, God is not a hidden God at all. The entire gospel is God making Himself visible. "No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known" (John 1:18). If you want to see the face of God, you already can. Look at Jesus. So when God seems hidden, it is not a summons to despair. It is a summons to seek. He has promised, "You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart" (Jeremiah 29:13). That promise has no fine print. And the risen Christ says this to His church: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me" (Revelation 3:20). Read that again and notice something remarkable. We picture ourselves outside in the dark, knocking on a door that God will not open. But He describes it the other way around. He is the one knocking. He is the one waiting to be let in, so that He can come and sit down and share a meal with us, which in that culture was the picture of the deepest friendship. That is not a God who is hiding from you. That is a God at the door. Whatever darkness you are walking through, however silent heaven seems today, this is never the eternal state of the believer. He has promised that He will show Himself to us. The garden we lost in Genesis is restored in the end, and we will walk with Him again in the cool of the day, with nothing left to hide from and nothing left to seek.

How Do We Recognise a False Prophet? Jesus warned us that they would come. So how do we know one when we see one? I want to answer this carefully, because in our part of the world it is not an abstract question. It is a matter of people's livelihoods, their families, and in some cases their souls. Walk through many of our cities and you will find the posters. A man with a title, a promise of breakthrough, a guarantee of healing, a queue of desperate people, and somewhere in the fine print, an amount. There are those among us who claim to be the man of God, and who teach that the blessing of heaven can be unlocked if only you will hand over enough money. There are others who preach from the Bible on a Sunday while quietly holding onto the ancestors and the sangoma during the week, blending two entirely different worlds and calling the mixture Christianity. And running through all of it is the health, wealth and prosperity teaching that has spread so widely across Africa, promising that faith will always produce a full bank account and a healthy body. I do not raise these things to be unkind. I raise them because Jesus Himself told us to be watchful. "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves" (Matthew 7:15). Notice that He did not say we would spot them easily. He said they come dressed as sheep. The disguise is the whole point, which means we need something better than instinct to tell the difference. Thankfully, He gave us exactly that. "You will recognise them by their fruits," He said. "Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit" (Matthew 7:16-17). This is the first and clearest test, and I want to press it further than we usually do. We tend to apply the fruit test only to a man's private conduct, and that certainly matters. But we must also apply it to his teaching. What does his message actually produce in the lives of the people who believe it? Go and look at the congregation, not the pulpit. If a doctrine leaves the poor poorer, if it leaves the sick ashamed, if it convinces a grieving mother that her child died because she did not believe hard enough, then you have seen the fruit. It does not matter how charismatic the tree looked from a distance. Scripture also speaks with startling bluntness about money, and I think we have been far too shy about repeating it. Proverbs gives us an image that I cannot read without thinking of the posters on our street corners. "Like clouds and wind without rain is a man who boasts of a gift he does not give" (Proverbs 25:14). Picture what that means to a farmer in a dry season. The sky darkens, the wind picks up, everything in you rises with hope, and then nothing falls. That is precisely what these men do to people who are desperate for rain. They gather like a storm over the poorest among us, they promise the very thing that is most needed, and they deliver nothing but a lighter wallet. Jude uses the same picture of false teachers, calling them "waterless clouds, swept along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted" (Jude 12). Peter calls them "waterless springs and mists driven by a storm" (2 Peter 2:17). The Holy Spirit seems to have chosen this image deliberately. All the appearance of refreshment, none of the substance. And on the specific matter of profiting from ministry, the instructions could hardly be plainer. Peter tells elders to shepherd the flock "not for shameful gain, but eagerly" (1 Peter 5:2). Paul warns Timothy about people who imagine "that godliness is a means of gain" (1 Timothy 6:5). He tells Titus that certain teachers "are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach" (Titus 1:11). The prophet Micah brings the charge against the leaders of his own day: "Its heads give judgment for a bribe; its priests teach for a price; its prophets practise divination for money" (Micah 3:11). When Simon the magician offered payment for the power of the Spirit, Peter did not negotiate a fee structure. He rebuked him outright. So when you encounter a ministry where the flow of money runs consistently from the poorest people upward into the pockets of one man, you do not need a prophetic gift to interpret what you are seeing. You need only a Bible. The second thing I want to address is the mixing of Christianity with witchcraft and the veneration of ancestors, because this is enormously common among us and it is often defended as cultural sensitivity rather than named as what it is. A man may preach genuine truths about God from Scripture and then, in the same breath, direct people toward the ancestors, or toward the sangoma, or toward practices that Scripture explicitly forbids. This is not a richer, more African faith. It is a divided one, and God has never accepted a divided allegiance. The passage that deals most directly with true and false prophets in the Old Testament sits immediately after a list of exactly these practices. "There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practises divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD" (Deuteronomy 18:10-12). It is no accident that the warning about false prophets follows on directly from that list. Paul says the same thing to a church surrounded by pagan practice: "You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons" (1 Corinthians 10:21). Elijah put the question to Israel more sharply than anyone. "How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him" (1 Kings 18:21). I find that word "limping" so painfully accurate. Dualism does not give you two sources of strength. It gives you a limp. Now I want to say something that I think explains why so many sincere believers are taken in, because we often assume that false teaching announces itself with obvious lies. It almost never does. Go back to the garden. When the serpent came to Eve, he did not open with a flat denial. He opened with a question about something God had genuinely said, and then he offered a statement that was partly true. He told her that her eyes would be opened and that she would know good and evil, and in a terrible sense that turned out to be accurate. The lie was folded inside the truth, which is exactly what made it swallowable. Poison served on its own is refused. Poison mixed into good food is eaten. This is how false prophets operate. They will quote Scripture, often accurately. They will affirm that Jesus is Lord. They will say true and even moving things about the goodness of God, and everything in you will begin to relax. And then, somewhere in the middle of all that truth, comes the redirection: that God's blessing depends on your seed offering, that your illness is proof of your weak faith, that the ancestors must be honoured alongside Christ. God's sheep are not usually led astray by teaching that is wholly false. They are led astray by teaching that is mostly true. And when that happens, we arrive at one of the most disturbing passages in all of Scripture. Through Ezekiel, God confronts the shepherds of Israel and says, "Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep" (Ezekiel 34:2-3). Read that slowly and let the horror of it land. The men appointed to feed the flock were instead feeding on the flock. The very people entrusted with protecting the sheep had become the thing the sheep needed protecting from. If you want a single verse to describe a preacher who grows wealthy while his congregation grows desperate, that is it. There is one final test, and I believe it exposes the prosperity teaching more completely than any argument I could construct. That teaching simply cannot account for the New Testament. Consider Paul. Here is a man who wrote a third of the New Testament, who was caught up into the third heaven, through whose hands God worked extraordinary miracles. And this same man carried a thorn in the flesh that God refused to remove, and was told instead, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9). Consider Timothy, Paul's own son in the faith, who suffered from ongoing stomach trouble. Paul's counsel to him was not a rebuke about his faith. It was practical and pastoral: "No longer drink only water, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments" (1 Timothy 5:23). Frequent ailments, in a man discipled personally by the apostle Paul. Consider Trophimus, whom Paul mentions almost in passing: "Trophimus I left ill at Miletus" (2 Timothy 4:20). Left ill. Not healed, not restored, simply left behind because he was too sick to travel. And Epaphroditus, of whom Paul writes that "he was ill, near to death. But God had mercy on him" (Philippians 2:27). Now ask the obvious question. Are we prepared to say that the apostle Paul did not have enough faith? That he lacked the formula? That he failed to sow the right seed? The suggestion is absurd on its face, and yet it is the necessary conclusion of what these prophets teach. Their doctrine has no category for a sick Timothy, no room for Job, no explanation for a Saviour who owned nothing and died on a cross. It collapses the moment you open the Bible it claims to preach from. That, in the end, is the surest test of all. Ask what a man is actually pointing you toward. Paul described his own ministry in one line: "What we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake" (2 Corinthians 4:5). The false prophet is always somewhere near the centre of his own message. His name is on the poster, his anointing is the commodity, his account is where the money settles. The true shepherd keeps stepping out of the frame so that you can see Christ more clearly. So watch the fruit, in the man and in what his teaching produces in the people. Watch where the money moves. Watch whether he asks you to hold anything alongside Christ. Watch whether the truth he tells is leading somewhere true. And above all, watch whether he is feeding the sheep, or feeding on them. We have a Good Shepherd who did the exact opposite of every one of these men. He did not take from the flock to enrich Himself. He laid down His life for the sheep. Once you have seen Him clearly, the wolves become much easier to recognise.