Anyway when I was still living at my dads I would often be late in the mornings because I love reading something while I eat breakfast and he got the newspaper everyday. Since I have moved out and ended up on welfare which isn't really enough for anything including a newspaper subscription, I would just sit at the table for breakfast reading the garbage or cereal boxes in front of me over and over again. I've done all the puzzles on the back of honeycomb cereal boxes maybe 50 times and they're for young children so yeah I got bored. And so one day maybe a month or two ago I thought to myself, what should I read that would be better and not only better but the best thing to read in the morning? Duh the Bible! Usually when I decide to read the Bible I feel very serious like I'm studying it which is fine except that I think the gravity of it all can make it hard to want to sometimes. In a moment of high clarity I realized its really just good to be exposed to God's word as much as possible so I just started at the beginning and read almost every morning and now I'm in Exodus where God is in the middle of giving all those laws and instructions to Moses. Amazingly whether I'm high or not I always learn so much about God's character and just so many random awesome details of how divine love works. So even though there's so much shit going on right now I'm still holding it together and I feel like God's word is the glue.
Something I thought about this morning while reading is the idea of wrestling with God. One of the laws given to Moses mentioned something like if something bad happened to you, you can bring it before God because He let it happen. He's not the source of it but He could have stopped it and didn't. This sounded weird to me because I'm not in the habit of blaming God for anything and/or hating Him when things go wrong. Although I did get pretty close when my mom died. I just blamed our sinful natures and the spiritual forces of evil. Also, He's the source of all that is good so I figured I should be always thankful. But the truth is also that He could have stopped any of the times I got hurt by others and I feel like its happened a lot. And this is something I have never let myself think about before. I have the feeling that it is important to grapple with this concept to grow closer to God. So as I think about it now I realize that God uses the darkness of evil and suffering to show us just how incredibly bright His goodness and glory is. We are limited beings who need contrast to see and understand things. He uses evil for good like how He used peoples greed and fear within the establishment to end up raising Jesus from the dead and saving us all in the process. He used death to bring life to everyone. Crazy. Mind-blowing.
So clearly all the hurts and pains I've suffered are all part of the massive and intricate plan God has to save us from evil. I'll never see the big picture in this lifetime but after reading some of the laws God gave to Moses it is obvious that He thinks of absolutely everything and everyones well-being always.
