If Only …

Cindy Hess Kasper’s recent article in Our Daily Bread certainly rang bells for me. She was thinking about the incident where Jesus raised Lazarus from the tomb. At first, Jesus had delayed coming when called. Mary rushed out to meet Him.

“Lord,” she moaned, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died” (John 11:32 ESV).

“If only ...”

It is the most natural reaction in the world. From a very young age we think of what might have been. I remember slipping in the bath as a child. My parents came in to rescue me. I kept crying, “I could have drowned.” The simple fact was, I didn’t, and I am still here to tell the tale.

Cindy had a memory of her own. “As we exited the parking lot, my husband slowed the car to wait for a young woman riding her bike. When Tom nodded to indicate she could go first, she smiled, waved, and rode on. Moments later, the driver from a parked SUV threw his door open, knocking the young bicyclist to the pavement. Her legs bleeding, she cried as she examined her bent-up bike.
Later, we reflected on the accident:

“’If only we had made her wait … If only the driver had looked before opening his door. If only …’ Difficulties catch us up in a cycle of second-guessing ourselves.

“’If only I had known my child was with teens who were drinking … If only we had found the cancer earlier …’

“When unexpected trouble comes,” she comments, “we sometimes question the goodness of God. We may even feel the despair that Martha and Mary experienced when their brother died. Oh, if Jesus had only come when He first found out that Lazarus was sick!

“Like Martha and Mary, we don’t always understand why hard things happen to us. But we can rest in the knowledge that God is working out His purposes for a greater good. In every circumstance, we can trust the wisdom of our faithful and loving God.”

I feel grateful to Cindy for drawing our attention to this topic. The “if only” questions display both a lack of reasoning (it is illogical to distress yourself about something that never happened) and a lack of faith. In a sense, Mary’s sister Martha belatedly showed more faith than her sibling. She too lamented,

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,”

but she then added,

“But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you” (John 11:21-22).

There is one “if only” that we seldom if ever give voice to, and it is the only one that should really be important to us. If we fail to put our trust in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, we face an eternity cut off from God. That surely is the greatest disaster of all, and one which Jesus gladly prays His heavenly Father to deliver His trusting followers from.