God of love, hope, grace and peace – Day 8

All of us would like to just experience the sunny side of life. Sometimes, we look at other people and think, life is one big party for them! However, if we were allowed a closer look at their lives, we would quickly see that we do not have the full picture.

Andries Cilliers writes (translated from the Afrikaans): “This is what the world looks like: an interplay between the wonderful and the awful. Life is birth and death, gain and loss, love and hate, war and peace. This means that those who want only the good in life are fooling themselves.”

After Job had lost everything and painful sores broke out all over his body, he said to his wife, “If we accept the good from God, must we not also accept the bad?” (Job 2:10)

Only you know what season you now find yourself in. Perhaps, it dawned on you this morning that you are in a time of great joy; you have plenty of reasons to laugh and be happy! Or maybe, the opposite is true; you may feel that, right now, there is nothing to be happy about and despair threatens to overwhelm you.

The God of Ecclesiastes and the God of Job is still in control of time. God is in control of all of our times. It is with this knowledge that Paul writes to the Philippians, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: rejoice! … Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:4,6). Whether you are in a time of joy or sadness, you can know that God holds your time in his hands.