Charles Swindoll is Senior Pastor of Stonebriar Community Church in Frisco, TX, and Chancellor of Dallas Theological Seminary.
First, choose to view life through God’s eyes. This will not be easy because it doesn't come naturally to us. We cannot do this on our own. We have to allow God to elevate our vantage point. Start by reading His Word, the Bible. If you don’t know where to begin, start at the front. I have found that reading truth from the Bible – even when it doesn’t seem to have direct application to what I’m going through – gives my perspective a vertical dimension.
Pray and ask God to transform your thinking. Let Him do what you cannot. Ask Him to give you an eternal, divine perspective. Ask Him to replace your way of thinking with His. He delights to respond to prayer.
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Second, surrender your expectations. Stop trying to change the universe to work the way you think it should. Grief is essentially the process of adjusting your mind to accept a radically new situation. The sooner you accept that you will not get your way, the sooner you’ll heal. When you give up wishing things were different, you will start to change within. Let go of those resentments. Release your grip on what you want, no matter how good or right you think it is. Isn’t it exhausting, anyway?
As you surrender your expectations, ask the Lord to show you His plan. Again, you can find it written in the 66 books of the Bible, our only reliable source of absolute truth. Pray. Ask Him to open your eyes to the future He desires, and determine to join Him in whatever He has chosen to do. Take your time with this. Transformation is a slow and sometimes tedious process.
Third, acknowledge the resurrection of Jesus Christ and stake your future upon it. A genuine belief in the fact of His resurrection will radically transform how you approach life. The death of Jesus conquered sin and overcame death's finality, but it’s His resurrection that gives us life, hope, and reason to continue when everything appears hopeless.
Reprinted by permission from Great Lives: Jesus, by Charles Swindoll. Copyright © 2008 Thomas Nelson Inc. Nashville, Tennessee. All rights reserved.