Your work has no handles...

A man loses his job at the peak need of his family...a young mother suffers a major health crisis that impairs her ability to care for her little children...a college student fails the crucial test that removes him from the program of study he thought sure was God's will...a fire destroys the home of an elderly couple who could not afford to carry insurance on their paid-for home and they lose it all...an only child of a sweet Christian couple is diagnosed with terminal illness...Everything on this list I have seen...and frankly it doesn't make sense to me. But there is another side too...a man who is a brute of a man to his family, inherits 300,000 dollars and blows it on cocaine, alcohol, and...well you get the picture. It is the old good verses evil...why do the righteous suffer and the wicked do so well.
I want to suggest that we often personally skew the picture. We only chose to see the wicked who are doing well. Many are not.
Perhaps there is another problem with our view of these "tragedies." You see our ability to see and understand these events come only from the side of our limited nature and experience. Our perspective is very small and very blurry. We think life should have certain "handles" to make sense of it. And when those handles are missing we balk and say...it makes no sense. Think about this.
There is a wider, deeper, better, and more invigorating perspective out there that we must gravitate toward. God is at the console of the ship we call life. We are passengers on this ship and his navigation may not make sense to us, but He holds the whole perspective of the journey itself. He knows where He is taking the ship, and He knows how to get it there. And in the process He keeps everyone one board from disaster. The sharp turn of the boat, the bumpy waters, and the windstorm he seems to guide the ship directly into makes no sense to the passengers...but it makes perfect sense to the Captain. He holds the wider, deeper, better, and more invigorating perspective. I take you to the words of Isaiah in 45:9..."Woe to him who strives with him who formed him, a pot among earthen pots! Does the clay say to him who forms it, 'What are you making?' or 'Your work has no handles.'" Maybe the work really does have handles or maybe it does not need our kind of handles. His perspective always makes sense. We just have to trust it. Think about it.

The wrongful science of forgetfulness?

Is it possible that we are more tuned into forgetting God's blessings than into remembering them? If that is so, why? I fear we have made forgetting God's good things in our lives into an exact science. It is almost a right we have carefully adopted. Could it be we enjoy the negative exercise of remembering all the bad stuff? It enables us to have a "pity" party any time we choose. It gives us a sense of how unfair life has been to us. It enables us to "wallow" in our frustration, and even justify our feelings of having been some how taken advantaged of by life. Ultimately, [perish this thought] is it a subtle way we have of getting back at God for allowing such "undeserved" things to come into our lives?
God warned Israel when they were about to enter the new land he had promised them & receive the houses, lands, vineyards, and crops that they would forget all the things he had done for them in the wilderness, and forget Him altogether. [and it did happen...remember the period of the judges?]
I have thought a lot about how easily I allow the blessings of God to slip from my mind, and how quickly I recall the disappointments, frustrations, and negative events that march through my life. Perhaps some of it IS Satanic. After all, to lose sight of the blessings is to dismiss the blesser in my mind. Perhaps some of it IS fleshly self-centeredness. The tendency to build my world all around me and view all the circumstances as just about me is a strong and overwhelming impulse in me.
How do we negate the wrongful science of forgetfulness when it comes to God's blessings? One of the devices God used to help Israel recall His blessings was the commands to erect memorials during the Exodus journey. He gave the building of stone markers, the observance of certain days and weeks [with jubilee and festival events], and other exercises to make recall of those blessings and victories a priority. I think I need to erect some memorials in my life. Maybe a shadow box that commemorates certain family blessings [like my oldest daugther practices with her family] would be helpful. Or the creating of cards [blessing cards] that I take out periodically and review [like my son creates to remind him of too easily forgotten blessings]. Or perhaps just schooling myself to pray everyday over the blessings. The discipline of bringing them up in prayer will force my mind to return to those blessings.
I don't like the wrongful science of forgetfulness. It is a blind man's journey and I want off of it.