winter

I wrote this is the airport, and I'll lose or forget it if I don't type it..

I'm sitting in a crowded airport, people on both sides, all from their own backgrounds, with their own experiences and happenings- their failures and their loses, their victories. It makes me wonder at a God like that. A God that controls time and space; a God that has His very "hook in their nose" (2 Kings 19:28) that controls all things simply because He is God and He created all of this. I wish I realized this great truth all the time- that my Heavenly Father has my good in mind through all events of life. It's so easy to see the tragedies of life as harsh punishments from God sent from fire in His fingertip- the judge, always giving me the hard way so 'I'll learn more'. I have this great clowded view of God so often. He controls the Universe- He's huge!

"Now I saw that as God had His hand in all the providences and dispensations that overtook His elect, so He had His hand in all the temptations that they had to sin against Him, not to animate them to wickedness, but to choose their temptations and troubles for them, and also to leave them for a time to such things only as might not destroy, but humble them- as might not put them beyond, but lay them in the way of the renewing of His mercy." -John Bunyan

It inevitably seems that when I come out of these hard times or seasons I almost long to be back in them, although at the time no thought would have been accepted. I learned in a documentary yesterday that the Kiwi bird species of New Zealand have lost their ability to fly because of lack of preditors. Interesting, isn't it? Those things in life that try to hurt us, bring up down, are the very things that keep us flying and being how God created us to be- the "bad" makes us not just be typical, but to fly. Or here's another:

"We are apt to overshoot, in the days that are calm, and to think ourselves far higher, and more strong than we find we be, when the trying day is upon us... we could not live without such turnings of the hand of God upon us. We should be overgrown with flesh, if we had not our seasonable winters. It is said that in some countries trees will grow, but will bear no fruit because there is not winter there." Without the often harsh, trying winter it could bear no fruit and be what God intended for it to be.