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God “rescued me, because he delighted in me.” He saw beneath my brokenness and he loved me. “He also brought me out into an open place” of healing and wholeness. I am no longer lost in that deep dark pit. Thank you, Jesus.

Evil does have its day but rest assured those days are numbered. God will win in the end; indeed he already has won and all Satan can do is march through the trenches God has already dug for him. Evil will appear to have won some battles. It will gloat and prance and throw a terrific farcical victory parade. Evil will do its damndest to make you think you have lost. But it’s all a show.

The closer you get to God, the less blind your faith becomes. As you seek him, he slowly opens your eyes. He turns on the lights of your soul one ray at a time to reveal himself to you. Moment by moment, through the seasons of your life, through your hardships and joys — each experience of sensing his presence, hearing his voice, recognizing his unmistakable handiwork in your life, opens your eyes a tad more.

If only we would mold our hopes around what God has already told us. Life is going to be difficult. The innocent will suffer. He warns us about this over and over again. This current world is under a curse. True justice will never truly manifest during this particular time period. We get glimpses of it here and there, but it will never hold. That is why the good news is good news. Justice IS indeed coming if we only wait for it. God longs to give us eternal vision rather than our incomplete faulty focus on this life only. Eternal vision corrects our false expectations and gives us hope and peace for the future.

How backwards we think of it. God doesn’t punish us for our mistakes. Our wrongdoings create their own punishment. Our own faults are bricks comprising the wall between us and God. We lay each brick ourselves as we construct our own personal Towers of Babel. But as we shove each brick into place, Jesus stands ready to tear them all down if we only ask him.

I get it. It’s not fair! Those Matthew 20 laborers who sweated in the field all dang day made not a penny more than those who labored a mere hour. But this is a tale of God’s great mercy. Truth be told, not a one of us can earn God’s forgiveness, much less his blessings. They are poured out upon us from the rich depths of his enduring love not from any merit on our part. God’s grace is offered freely to us all.

The kingdom of heaven is a turned around, upside down place where the “first will be last; and the last, first…” where all the rules we’ve learned in this physical world do not apply. The rich, the elite, the popular, the beautiful don’t rule the kingdom of heaven because none of those things are important there. The kingdom of heaven is a world of soul and spirit. The greatest treasure in the kingdom of heaven, and in our own muddled up world, is Jesus. And he is FREE to everyone who wants him.

Everyone experiences pain and hurt and sickness no matter how rich or how smart they are. Things are going to be unfair. We aren’t going to always get our way. That is just the truth. Trying to deny this truth is only a bandaid on a bloody stump. We can get away with it during good times. But some day, some how, life is going to get difficult and that false tower of denial is going to come crashing down. We’re much better off confronting this truth and dealing with it now instead of from the underside of a tragedy.

We live in a cursed world. We all WILL suffer in one way or another eventually. Nothing happens that God doesn’t allow. Jesus tells us to forgive each other, but can we forgive GOD? Only when we consider all of eternity, can we understand that our sufferings in this life truly are “light and momentary afflictions that are achieving for us an eternal glory that outweighs them all.” (2 Cor. 4:17)  Only someone with eternal vision can respond to suffering with worship as Job does.