The title of this post technically assumes something that
isn’t true – that God sometimes isn’t good.
We know that God is good all the time.
The Bible says so, His Spirit constantly emphasizes the fact in our
souls, and it has been experientially validated repeatedly everywhere you
look. His goodness is just as vital to His
character as oxygen is to our existence.
If He wasn’t good, He wouldn’t be God.
However, how many times do we live as though He isn’t good? Think about it...
But anyway, at my church here in Greenville, we do this neat
thing on Wednesday nights where people have an opportunity to share how God has
been good to them. This usually takes
the form of testimonies of answered prayer…someone raises a hand, a deacon puts
a mic in it, and the person stands up and recounts the story. Tonight was my first time in a long time
being back because I was closing every night at Bellis last semester, which
meant that I rarely got to go to prayer meeting, if ever. So even though I didn’t feel comfortable
standing up with a mic and telling people what God has been doing for me this
last week, I really wanted to share it because it’s a great way to encourage
other people. And since I’ve always been
more comfortable writing out my thoughts than talking them out, I thought I’d
share using this medium.
That being said, last week I started back up at the copy
center after being away for Christmas break.
When school isn’t in session, the GAs are supposed to get as close to 40
hours for the week as possible. Due to
various things, I was short…like 3 hours short, by my calculations. And in the grand scheme of life, it’s not a
huge big deal, but I’m a college student, right? I have bills to pay. God poked me a little though. It’s been a rough few months for me, and I’ve
unconsciously called His character into question simply by my actions and
responses to the curveballs that have been thrown at me lately. But with each one, He has shown Himself to be
good, in spite of me. I find every time
that He is strong in my weakness, and that His goodness is a rock that I can
bunker down behind and be secure. I
tried to adopt that mentality again.
Anyway, Saturday rolled around. I work Saturdays the entire 4 hours Bellis is
open, usually getting there early and then finishing late in order to get
everything done. And this week, it was a
rainy Saturday, nobody was out, and the place was pretty dead. We get bulletins from a lot of churches in
the area, and I’d already printed them out and done the finishing work
necessary, such as folding or whatever.
An hour before closing, one pick-up person jangled my doorbell. I knew her by sight, and I knew what she was
here for. This particular establishment
happens to be a good-sized Presbyterian church downtown, and they usually order
450 bulletins per week. It’s a big job. They’d sent it later than usual, but we got
it done the day before in good time, thanks to a new machine we got just before
break that can do all kinds of cool things, so everything was good. I heaved the box onto the counter, and the
lady looked under the lid, and her eyes got really big and she gasped, “Oh
no…”
My own eyes got really big.
I’m thinking, Uh oh…I’m the Only
One Here…absolutely not…can I think about this…phone a friend…do I get a
lifeline…
She said, “I sent you the wrong bulletin. This was last week’s bulletins…I can tell by
the announcements without even opening it.”
She looked at me and said in a very small voice, “Is there ANY
way…”
I looked at her, made a decision (I’m an on-the-fly sort of
thinker), and said, “It’s a good thing we’re slow today.”
So I stayed. I
babysat the machine while it did its cool folding and stapling thing, all 450
other bulletins. And because this church has a billable account, I could leave
the job in a box outside the door when it was done and go home. Which I did, although an hour after the Bellis doors had locked.
Lunch closes on Saturdays before I get off, and I was hungry. Out of curiosity though, I checked my time on
the way back to my apartment to see how many hours I’d put in for the week. I wasn’t expecting to make it even close
still. Have I mentioned that I’m not a
math person? It’s a miracle when I
figure my check book right so that it says what the bank says…and if it
doesn’t, it’s usually a weird mathematical error on my part. In this instance, I hadn’t done my
timey-wimey math correctly. I had been
off by an hour and a half. I ended up
being 16 minutes short of my goal, which is perfectly acceptable in my
estimation because I always purposely overshoot my goals for work hours.
It wasn’t my plan to stay late. It wasn’t my plan to miss the date on those
bulletins and print them all without catching the mistake. But God lets us do stuff like that in order
to show us that, in spite of ourselves, He is good. In the face of my ingratitude and
complaining, He is faithful to orchestrate my life in such a way that forces me
to see my weakness and my pride and then acknowledge His greatness.
I read an article once where the author was complaining
about when people say that even though such-and-such happened, God is “still
good” or “still in control”. The point
was that statements like that imply a cessation of His goodness or sovereignty
in the minds of those who use the clichés.
I get the author’s drift, and perhaps I’m over-analyzing, but it should
go the other way, in a sense. Intellectually,
we know that God is good. It’s a fact
that has been drilled into our fundamental brains ever since we first started
lisping “Jesus loves me” in toddler church.
Or whatever. But we forget
because we’re finite humans. When
something happens to jerk us out of our self-sufficient fog, we discover God
being good and great and faithful and true and holy all along, right alongside
us. And sometimes it’s a surprise that
knocks us to our knees in remorse because of our forgetfulness, or out of shock
because we look at how we’ve been living and see responses that haven’t been
reflective of the reality of God’s goodness.
God is good…when we forget it.
Why? Well…because He’s good.
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