devotional

2007 September 11

Created by Rachel 16 years ago
"I tell you the truth, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy." (John 16:20-22 NIV) There are some days when, frankly, I don't feel much like worshiping God. There are probably more days like that than I'd care to admit. But usually those are days are when I'm staring at my circumstances and making faithless judgments about what I see around me.. And I struggle with the God-truth that he is in the circumstances that surround my life - all the circumstances. Have you ever considered that heartbreak is part of God's plans for you, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future"? (Jeremiah 29:11 NIV) We put so much energy into avoiding the hurt when God would have us embrace it. He wants us to know that he can heal our hurts, even use our hurts for his benefit, and for us to faithfully believe that sometimes the circumstances we think are harming us are actually positive situations God is engineering. . God, who is omnipotent, sees the breadth and depth of our circumstances, and he knows his plans for our lives. Thinking, then, like Christ, we can slowly, ever so slowly, begin to understand that avoiding the pain in our lives is actually an act of faithlessness. God calls us to faith in him during difficult circumstances; we'd rather place our faith in avoiding the circumstances.