“When things fall apart, most of us assume there has to be a reason.”

A thought by Larry Osborne, (2009-04-10) from his book, Spirituality for the Rest of Us: A Down-to-Earth Guide to Knowing God (p. 165). The Crown Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. (Click on the title to go to Amazon.com to buy the book.)

That seems like a reasonable assumption don’t you think?  Larry says, “We start looking for the lesson to be learned or the sin to be removed. If we can't find anything deserving of God's discipline, we figure that some day soon we'll see how this bad thing was really a good thing, a necessary part of our spiritual growth or future success.”

He goes on, “That's why we find it so confusing when we face a major defeat or failure without any seeming connection to sin, or any possible good that we can imagine coming out of it. We begin to question God's goodness and faithfulness. Our deeply ingrained assumption that failure must mean something is spiritually wrong makes it nearly impossible to accept the idea that we can fail when everything is spiritually okay.”

Job in the Old Testament is a classic example of this.  Larry says, “Job's tragic circumstances had nothing to do with God's displeasure. Quite the contrary. In God's eyes, there was no one like or equal to Job in all the earth. The fact is, in the midst of a trial or failure (unless we can see some direct connection to specific sinful choices), we can't know what it means. In Job's case, the stuff happening to him was more about us than about Job. He learned a few things, lived a lot longer, then died. I'm not sure it did much more for him than create some difficult and confusing memories. But since then, countless millions have found comfort and understanding in the book that bears his name. Who's to say Job ever had a clue his story would help so many?”

Larry says, “Whenever we let our failures, both short-term and long-term, become the determiner of God's character or the condition of our spiritual walk, we'll inevitably come to some wrong conclusions. Then we'll just as certainly make some wrong decisions—the most common of which will be running from the valley, even when it's right where God wants us to be.”

So how is your trust in God going?