I read Psalm 12 this morning, and it brought me back to a big thing God has been teaching me this past month. He has been teaching me and reminding me that He is good ALL the time. For whatever reason, a few words stuck out to me in the verse. “Like gold refined 7 times” I know the Lord laid this on my heart, because the first thing that came up when I looked it up said, “The process by which gold or silver are purified is that they are put through extreme heat. In the same way, God tests our hearts, purifies our motives and brings us forth as the precious, kind hearted people that he called us to be. He tests us with a singular goal- to bring us forward, better and more precious for his purposes. The process produces in us a life that is more like Christ.” (Brown, 2011) It all makes perfect sense with what He has been reminding me and showing me about His goodness.
I know that God is good. When I am struggling with something or facing trial, someone is always sure to remind me that “God is good.” It’s who He is, it’s His character. But recently I have found that in my heart I don’t always believe that to be true. I was processing out loud with my squad mentor what I’ve been struggling with so far on the race when she asked me, “Do you believe that God is always good, or are you believing that sometimes God withholds His goodness from us?” At first, I was defensive because HELLO duh, I know God is good! But as I thought about it more, I quickly realized that I don’t always believe it to be true. In fact, I think I live life sometimes waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s not to say I go through life with a negative perspective, but sometimes I live in a lie that if things seem really good, something bad is coming. I try to prepare myself so that things can’t disappoint me. I safeguard my heart so that when hard things come my way, I can brush them off instead of grieving. Because I knew something was coming, I knew to prepare and make sure it couldn’t catch me off guard or shake me. I think our culture breeds this kind of mindset. We sometimes rely on ourselves and our ability to dodge pain instead allowing it to soak in and letting the Lord work through it.
I think personally, a lot of times I walk out my faith in fear or disbelief that God is good to me all the time. A lot of times, I don’t live in full faith and belief that God is who He says He is and that He is good all the time. I live cautiously and try to act like I don’t have expectations instead of taking them to my Father so that we can grieve them together and so He can teach me. I find myself putting my faith in my own ability to prepare for hard situations and trials so that I can’t be shaken. But that’s not a firm foundation. Trusting in the Lord is the only firm foundation. It’s no secret that God refines though trials and suffering, but I think a lot of us believe a lie associated with that. The lie being that pain and suffering are bad, yet those emotions and feelings belong to the full spectrum of emotions God created. Pain and suffering are just as much from the Lord as joy and victory. In fact, we couldn’t have one without the other. And if the Lord is only good, and these feelings are from the Lord, then we have to believe that hard times are good times too. They are an essential part of life. God is only good, and He does not withhold goodness. He is not capable of being anything but good. We just don’t always have the capacity to understand that that goodness can look like pain and grief, because it doesn’t always feel good.
In these times, God is seeing if we will press into Him and trust Him above our emotions, or if we will pull away. He is refining us. The hard times are when the Lord reveals to us whether the words we sing on Sunday morning stay there, or we live them out. And when that other shoe does drop, we can have the choice to press into growth and rejoice in our own weakness, or to brush it off and deny what the Lord has for us.
Anyway, I need to be reminded of God’s goodness a lot. I think we all do sometimes! We get to rejoice in the good times and the bad. Because to God, it is all good. He weeps with us and His heart grieves with ours, but He calls those things good too.
