Have you ever noticed how people get caught in suspended animation? I have seen this in spades with women who are married to abusive or addicted husbands. They often have such love and compassion that they are desperate for the mending of their wayward spouse. This is a great thing, but the enemy really knows how to use a heart of mercy against us! We need to keep in mind that God is very merciful, but He is also TOUGH: you cannot manipulate Him; you cannot bend Him to your will; you cannot keep Him from bringing you face to face with realities you want to avoid. Can anyone who has been there say ouch or amen?

One way this plays out is that the Lord seeks to bring his compassionate people to a place where they will exercise “tough love” with their wayward loved ones. For the hard cases, tough by itself doesn’t get through; neither does love by itself. So the Lord works to raise up the loving ones into His kind of tough-mindedness. That’s where the quest for closure can get us snared.

If you love someone you want to reach them right? You see their potential, you see God’s love for them, you see who they could be if they could only respond to the light—and you want to be a vessel for Christ by speaking truth in love. This is fine so far. It is not only Biblical, but it is commanded of us (see Ephesians 4:15). But what happens when they don’t get it? Can you take your peace back? Can you take their resistance to grace and truth back to the Lord and do what He shows you?

The simple truth is that if a person won’t listen to words, he or she may have to learn to listen to circumstances by facing some hard consequences of their ways. The author of Psalm 119 rejoiced that his afflictions turned him from his ways back to God’s ways and made him a listener to God’s Word (Psalm 119:67, 71). God loved that man enough to let him reap what he was sowing, but in a way that helped him learn from his consequences. Could you do that for your loved one?

But suppose you want the kind of closure that comes from definitive answers. You want to know WHY, for instance—why don’t they get it. I feel this too whenever I’m preaching to the homeless at the Old Savannah City Mission. One of the least satisfying things about a person’s resistance to grace is that it never gets explained to us! At least not until (God willing) they completely repent and return and can tell us. Until then the person is caught in a web of deception and they themselves rarely know WHY—they have their guesses, sure, and their excuses, but the real WHY only gets revealed by the Light that dawns with a full Return. So we don’t get our questions answered by them until then! And God usually is saying you’ll have to trust me for it.

On the other Hand, God absolutely knows and He is the only one who does. We secretly think that if we only knew WHY we could help them get free. But does having that information make it immediately easy for God to bring the person on board? Not at all—or everyone would be immediately converted. In my experience He has never brought me to the place where I know what He knows and on the basis of that knowledge I am able to go in and make the catch. It is apparently not something I need to know to be a part of the rescue. God however needs to know it, because He is the only one who can work on the inside of the person through every event He oversees to bring that person to the place where they are willing and able to see the Light. Only then can the person tell us what was keeping them bound up and resistant to grace.

Perhaps you have a loved one that has been resisting grace (the love that God was offering through your love as well as His own). This is a great mystery and tragedy. I can tell you as someone who received prayers and witness for three years for my conversion by one who loved me that I wasn’t about to tell her or anyone else what was really going on inside of me! And they wouldn’t have believed it if I had told them. So let it go, trust God and follow His steps and strategy. Father really does know best.