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Troubles?


Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
    we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.  For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:35-39)

It’s easy to think that if God loves us, we shouldn’t face trouble or hardship. Life should be straight-forward, easy, and under control. Persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, and sword just don’t fit in the picture. It’s an old idea. What goes around, comes around. Karma. If bad things are happening in your life, it must be because you deserve it. Job had friends who insisted that he had to be a scoundrel beneath his oh-so-pious clothes, because otherwise why would God take his property, his family, and his health? When the disciples encountered a man born blind, they wanted to know who had sinned: the man or his parents?
          What God says is that all those bad things that happen to good people? They aren’t an indication that God is angry with us. I like stories of people who have overcome. Have you ever met someone who overcame without having any struggles to overcome? Have you met someone who conquered without any resistance? Can someone actually win without doing anything?
          If you listen to authors like Dean Koontz, the way to write a great story is to plunge your characters into trouble on the first page. Everything they do to solve their problem or get out of trouble fails until at long last, they come to that all-or-nothing point where somehow, they must overcome the problem. In God’s telling of that story, as with many other tellings, the problem to be overcome led to the death of the Hero, which He overcame. We aren’t the hero of the story, but if our own stories were without problems, challenges, or dangers, what the Hero did wouldn’t matter much. Our part in the story would include no victories.
          We might be miserable failures, because otherwise we couldn’t be great victors. Were there nothing to overcome, we could do nothing but fail. One of our victories involves changing our attitudes about troubles, to trust God’s love for us in them.

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