#blessed

“God is good, all the time, and all the time, God is good.”

If you spend even a short amount of time in Christian circles, you are bound to hear this phrase multiple times.  I myself have said it more times than I can count.  We use it to encourage people, to remind them about God’s character.  We turn it into a cute little song and sing it in our Sunday schools.  We proclaim it from the pulpit and put it on our social media accounts in pretty little memes. We turn it into hashtags (#blessed, #godisgood) And we truly do mean it.  Because it is true.  It always has been and always will be a fact.  God is good.  We KNOW this to be true. 

But have you noticed that this phrase, these hashtags, are often only used when things are going our way.

“Got a promotion at work today!” #godisgood
“Proud to introduce our new baby to the world.” #blessed
“We have purchased a new home! ” #godisgood
“Got to spend the whole day together.  Love my family!” #blessed

But what about when it doesn’t FEEL like God is good?  What about when times are hard, when things go completely opposite of our dreams and wishes?  Does that mean that we aren’t blessed then?  Does the mean that God isn’t good?  

Rarely, if ever, do you see this:

“Lost my job today.” #blessed
“Was just confirmed – it is cancer.”  #godisgood
“Whole family is fighting so no one is going to spend the holidays together.” #blessed
“Can’t pay any of our bills this month.  Electricity was turned off.” #blessed

No, we never really see that.  Because when “bad” things are happening, we don’t FEEL that we are blessed.  We don’t FEEL that God is being good to us.

I’ll be honest with you here – there have been many times that I haven’t “felt” very blessed. Life has been hard.  At times, I’ve questioned God’s goodness to me.

Ah, but here’s the rub.  God’s goodness is not dependent on our circumstances.  His goodness is not measured by our feelings of being blessed.  Our feelings are fickle.  They are ever-changing. One day we can love purple, and the next day we can hate it. Things we felt when we were younger changed as we got older. Feelings are not to be trusted.

That’s why, when it comes to love and marriage, we say that love is a choice and not a feeling. Because if we based our marriage on how we feel (and many people do), then that marriage is not going to last.  Anyone who has been married for even a little while will tell you that if they were honest, there has been a time that they didn’t really FEEL like loving their spouse.  But they choose to love them instead.

And that’s what we need to remember when it comes to God being good to us.  Sometimes it is hard to clearly see God’s goodness and blessing.  But we have to choose to not trust our feelings, but rather, trust what we know to be true.  It doesn’t take a lot of searching in the Bible to see that God is good:

Psalm 34:8 “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!
Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him!”

Psalm 100:5 “For the Lord is good; his steadfast love
endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.”

Psalm 119:68 “You are good and do good; teach me your statutes.”

These are just a few verses from ONE book in the Bible that talks about His goodness.  There are multitudes more.

When we enter into difficult times, we cannot rely on our feelings to guide us.  We must choose to depend on the facts that we know - that God IS good.

So what do we do when we don’t feel it?  We believe that God is good.  But that doesn’t always help us to understand why these hard trials come.  How can a good God let these things happen? 

It’s simple, really.

Our idea of “good” is not always God’s idea of “good.”   In reality, they are often very very different.  And why is this?  Because He is God.  He knows all.  He sees all.  He knows the beginning and the end – the whole picture.  And because He sees this, He allows certain things into our lives to complete the picture.

Think of a jigsaw puzzle.  When the puzzle is in pieces in the box, it doesn’t make any sense. We pick up one piece and it doesn’t look like much.  But when it is all put together, it then becomes a beautiful picture where all the pieces fit perfectly.  And we now can see the complete picture - it makes sense.  

That’s how we need to look at our life.  We only see each day, each moment at a time.  It can be confusing and hard to understand.  But we are only looking at pieces, whereas God sees the whole picture.  He is not confused.  He understands.

Not only does He see the whole puzzle, He is the one who MADE the puzzle.  He knows exactly how everything fits together.  What doesn’t seem to fit in our eyes makes perfect sense in His. And while this fact doesn’t necessarily make our hard times easier to go through, it can give us a peace that everything is fitting together just as it should.

We don’t always feel that #Godisgood.  We don’t always feel like proclaiming that we are #blessed.  But we have to hold fast to the promises found in scripture that God IS good - His definition of good and not ours.  And that’s a great thing, since He sees the end scenario and we only see the here and now.

We may not see the blessings right away, (hence the term “blessings in disguise”).   In reality, it may not be until the end of our life when we can look back and say, “Yes, now I see.  God was so good to allow those circumstances into my life!  I really am #blessed!”

And even if we aren’t in this lifetime able to look back and perfectly see how it all fit together, we can still say #godisgood and that we are still #blessed.