Trusting God When Things Go Wrong

In everyday life, it’s easy to get swept aside by all the ugly and all the heartache and forget we’ve already won the battle. We’re just waiting for the end-game. God keeps all his promises.

Alrighty! Sorry for missing a post yesterday, y’all; I got caught up with making a birthday present for my beloved. His birthday’s this coming Sunday, so I had to make him something special. Happy early Birthday, Andrew! 😉

Anyway. As I pondered what to write about this morning, I decided I should look at a BYU talk that Andrew sent me. You can read it here if you want; it’s called “Trusting God When Things Go Wrong.” As always, Andrew managed to send me something I really needed to hear myself, so I figured I’d share it with you all as well. Naturally, BYU talks are always super long, so I can’t really talk about the whole thing here. But, I can focus on the core message, and that is simply this: No matter what we go through in life, our trust in the Lord will be what always pulls us through.

Ecclesiastes 7: Finding Wisdom In Affliction

Although Ecclesiastes can be pretty pessimistic, this chapter is a more upbeat one. It talks about how sorrow is turned into wisdom – and why the wise know the value of affliction.

Man, I just love bright green things. LOL

So, today I was reading from Ecclesiastes 7, and if you’ve read Ecclesiastes, you can definitely pick up on the pessimistic tune after a while. But really, that’s just the result of being honest about life without God. Cuz let’s face it: Life without God sucks. Like, really sucks. There’s no justice or goodness, nothing that lasts, nothing that’s really worthwhile. It’s all, as he describes it, “vanity.”

So, in trying out the advice from church leaders, I decided to take a look at this new chapter with the goal of finding optimism. And to my surprise, there was a lot here. You wouldn’t get that first impression tho, I imagine. I mean, just look at the second verse:

“It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart.” (Ecclesiastes 7:2)

So it’s better to suffer than to be happy? And happiness is never a good thing, but rather “the end of all men?” Talk about a letdown! But then I realized that can’t be the core message. Heavenly Father wants us to have joy in this life. Heck, just yesterday, I wrote about how God blesses us to enjoy our labors in life, even if they’re technically pointless in the grand scheme of things. He values our happiness very deeply, because he loves us. So, even if the chapter can be taken in a pessimistic way, that can’t be the real message. This is holy scripture, after all, given to us for our learning and benefit. Making us feel depressed about how much life sucks isn’t exactly keeping with that purpose.

Ecclesiastes 3: A Time For All Things

There’s a reason God put that tree in the Garden. Good and evil serve their purpose in this life. There’s a time, a season, and a purpose for all we experience. The writer of Ecclesiastes knew this.

Alrighty! I hope you like the flowers I found by a school recently, they’re really pretty. I think they’re called the Mexican Bird of Paradise or something similar, I dunno. That’s just what I’ve been told, correct me if I’m wrong XD

Anyway, I’m gonna get a little serious today. I was reading from Ecclesiastes 3, which many people can remember as the chapter that says there’s “a time and a season for all things.” You know, “a time to be born and a time to die, a time to love and a time to hate, a time to plant and a time to harvest,” all that good stuff. Sounds familiar now, ne?

Further into the chapter, a few verses really stuck out to me. I’m gonna focus on verses 16-17, because I feel these answer a question that always used to trouble me before I became LDS. Granted, I know the answer to that question now, but I didn’t realize there was biblical proof before.

Psalm 140: No Good Comes From Evil

Alrighty! Time for a new post, y’all. As I said before, heh, I love Psalms! So, I’m gonna talk a little about Psalms today. I think I’l keep this short and simple, with a nice picture of some reeds I found by my local pond. 😮

So, one verse in particular stuck out to me in this chapter, and namely because it ties into another verse in the Book of Mormon very well. Actually, a few. I love finding cross-references like this. 😀 So! Psalm 140:11 says this:

“Let not an evil speaker be established in the earth: evil shall hunt the violent man to overthrow him.”

What really caught my attention was “evil shall hunt the violent man to overthrow him.”

For those of you who have read the Book of Mormon, this is probably ringing a few bells. In particular, I think of Korihor. Yeah, remember him? Korihor The Antichrist? He went around teaching everyone that God didn’t exist, and that there was no good or evil, so they should do whatever the heck they wanted. Even though he lived in a people utterly surrounded by God’s presence and constant blessings. What the heck, Korihor. ¬_¬