I hear it, but I’m only half-listening. On purpose.
I’m distracting myself groping for the truth to counter these lies, the
lies that don’t whisper quiet, but yell, from everywhere some days… There it is.
The truth:
“No good thing will He withhold from those who walk uprightly.”
There is good to experience in this world, and that’s
hopeful.
There are not good things, and it is possible to experience
those, I believe. Sin steals good from
my moments, until I throw myself on His grace again.
Good is not always what the world defines. Sometimes good takes everything I’ve got and
more, but there is always enough for the next thing, too. It is not always pleasure. It is not always satisfaction of every
hunger.
Good exceeds the glory of those things. It is glorious to praise God while still
hungering. My dear friend, Alanna, has
had a quote from her hero, Amy Carmichael, up on her whiteboard,
Part of the glory in this good is that God is here, walking
with me, and I am not alone however lonely my heart is.
God is able to give good things; they are “in His gift” as
the old term goes, and He chooses not to withhold them. It isn’t that I deserve them, even when I’m
walking uprightly. It has been
established that “there is none who does good” and “all our righteousnesses are
like filthy rags”, that the “wages of sin is death” so that every breath, every
new morning I wake to, is another instance of mercy.
Uprightness is accepting His grace, rejecting my own way and
welcoming His. It is incompatible with
this welcoming to reject what He calls good, the way He scripts my days and
years. If there is suffering in it, in
the uprightness, it is not something to be ashamed of.
Welcoming looks like peace, looks like prayer, looks like
little work and lots of loves and sometimes not trying to change the people
that God wants to change Himself. It
looks like rejoicing and praise and a life of confident purpose, or if not
confidence in that, at least security in belovedness. That's hopeful.
