April 27, 2001
"Consider what God has done:
Who can straighten what he has made crooked?
When times are good be happy but when times are bad consider:
God has made the one as well as the other.
Therefore a man can not discover anything about his future."
Ecclesiastes 7:13-14
This is sometimes a hard concept for me to grasp... God determines pleasant times of comfort and rejoicing in our lives as we need them and we accept them readily!! But in the same way God determines times of affliction, a season in our life that gives us the opportunity to reflect on him, on our life and to grow and change through it. That is so much harder to accept. I have grown to believe that God will work good in the end but sometimes in the middle it messes with my concept of God. I get caught in thinking that perhaps its because he's disappointed in me. In light of that it's the last part of the verse that does the most for me.. whether I am in a season of rejoicing or a season of affliction it doesn't tell me anything about my future. It doesn't mean anything other than God wants me to learn something through this season - right now. Those negative doubting thoughts come from satan and are designed to pull me away from trusting and finding comfort in God!! Whatever I'm going through at the moment.. is just that... it's what I'm going through at the moment. I just need to learn from it and know that God loves me, my place in his family is secure and I can relax and perhaps have a better perspective of hard times.