“Shall we accept good from God and not trouble?” Job 2:10b
During our Night of Worship last night, our worship leader, John, shared about how he was from the south and what he has struggled with the most in moving to Michigan, is the winter. As he put it, “the long, dark, cold, miserable winter." But then he talked about spring and the beauty of the flowers coming up and the grass turning green and the weather becoming warmer with the promise of summer. It reminded me of a sunrise I saw one morning, an amazingly beautiful sunrise, with a full rainbow of color. When I saw it, I thought about how it was the clouds reflecting the colors, which made it so beautiful. Otherwise, it would have been an ordinary sunrise, not that I'm minimizing the beauty of that, but perhaps one that I wouldn't have even noticed. On that morning I thought about how we are, especially as Christ followers, we want the beauty, we just don’t necessarily want to live through the cloudy days to get there. Or as John put it, maybe we can appreciate the spring, simply because we’ve lived through the winter.
Job knew about trouble. He had already lost everything and his wife was telling him to “curse God and die.” (2:9) Yet Job held on, I imagine with all that he had. Many who have lived through a deep, dark valley in their life have expressed that they wouldn’t go back and do it differently, because they wouldn’t want to give up the closeness they felt to God while in that valley.
This morning at bible study one shared, and all agreed, that it’s so much easier to cling to God and surrender to His will with the big, I mean really big, things, than it is in the little day to day things. But what would life be like if we clung daily to Him as He so desires us to do?
We have to remember that the reason we can surrender is because we have a God we can trust. And even though we might not be able to see what He has in store for us, we have to trust that it it's probably bigger than we can even imagine, or hope for, or dream. And we have to learn to accept the trials that come and not just the blessing, and remember that we only have the rainbow because we've had the rain.
During our Night of Worship last night, our worship leader, John, shared about how he was from the south and what he has struggled with the most in moving to Michigan, is the winter. As he put it, “the long, dark, cold, miserable winter." But then he talked about spring and the beauty of the flowers coming up and the grass turning green and the weather becoming warmer with the promise of summer. It reminded me of a sunrise I saw one morning, an amazingly beautiful sunrise, with a full rainbow of color. When I saw it, I thought about how it was the clouds reflecting the colors, which made it so beautiful. Otherwise, it would have been an ordinary sunrise, not that I'm minimizing the beauty of that, but perhaps one that I wouldn't have even noticed. On that morning I thought about how we are, especially as Christ followers, we want the beauty, we just don’t necessarily want to live through the cloudy days to get there. Or as John put it, maybe we can appreciate the spring, simply because we’ve lived through the winter.
Job knew about trouble. He had already lost everything and his wife was telling him to “curse God and die.” (2:9) Yet Job held on, I imagine with all that he had. Many who have lived through a deep, dark valley in their life have expressed that they wouldn’t go back and do it differently, because they wouldn’t want to give up the closeness they felt to God while in that valley.
This morning at bible study one shared, and all agreed, that it’s so much easier to cling to God and surrender to His will with the big, I mean really big, things, than it is in the little day to day things. But what would life be like if we clung daily to Him as He so desires us to do?
We have to remember that the reason we can surrender is because we have a God we can trust. And even though we might not be able to see what He has in store for us, we have to trust that it it's probably bigger than we can even imagine, or hope for, or dream. And we have to learn to accept the trials that come and not just the blessing, and remember that we only have the rainbow because we've had the rain.
