Grateful for the good... and the bad

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (Romans 5:1-5)

Henri Nouwen, in his book Bread for the Journey, wrote:

To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives – the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections – that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. Let’s not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.

Hard spiritual work, indeed! It is hard spiritual work to rejoice in our sufferings, to be grateful for even the sorrows, the failures, and the rejections, and to see in them “the guiding hand of a loving God,” leading us to the place we are and into the people we are meant to become. As Caedmon’s Call puts it in their song Lead of Love: “Had to walk the rocks to see the mountain view/ Looking back, I see the lead of love.”

Think of Joseph in the Old Testament: sold into slavery by his brothers, falsely accused of rape and thrown into prison by Potiphar’s wife, and forgotten by Pharaoh’s cupbearer when he was freed from prison. But when God had placed him as second in command over all of Egypt, and his brothers came from far away begging for food, and Joseph finally revealed himself to them, what did he say? “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Genesis 50:20). Notice how Joseph did not excuse what his brothers did to him, but neither did he allow anger and bitterness to blind him from the guiding hand of a loving God, who had worked in the evil to bring about a greater good.

I don’t know what you have experienced in your life. I dare not minimize the traumas, the sorrows, the failures, and the rejections that you have endured, that have led you to despair, to anger, even to a loss of faith and hope in God. But I want to encourage you today to meditate on the deep love your God has for you, and to consider what it would look like to trust in the guiding hand of that loving God. As long as you are alive, there are still chapters to be written in the book of your life. Maybe the chapter you are currently in, or the chapters that have come before, have been really painful. But God is good, and works all things together for good for those who love Him and have been called according to His purpose. May He give you the grace to one day be grateful for even the sufferings you have endured, as you watch Him bring them about to a greater good.