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Making Good From Bad
By Clarissa Worley Sproul
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| Photo: iStockphoto |
Probably the most profound thing God has done for our planet is to make amazing, redemptive lemonade from all our evil lemons. God did not bring lovely to planet earth to replace the bad and make good. Instead he came empty-handed and used what we had, the guck and yuck of our condition to bring about a profoundly beautiful transformation. Think about it, Jesus used a mob of murderers—hating and spitting on him—to accomplish the most beautiful saving event of all history. He took the rage of our painful souls and embraced it to the point of death so that he could win the right to take death from us forever. Ok. Wow.
And Jesus is our guide for facing all things evil in life. No matter how bad the circumstance, it can be leveraged for good. Notice I didn’t say crushed and obliterated for good—no—leveraged for good. It’s like the donkey who is being buried alive by his evil master. Having been shoved into a deep hole by the mad farmer, the poor creature was standing there paralyzed as the dirt was shoveled on top of him. And then the glorious idea hit. All he had to do was pack the dirt down beneath his four legs and sooner or later the hole would be filled by the farmer himself and he could step back into the sun. Voila!
It’s really that way in life. If you accept two very profound principles, and commit to them, all the things that flow your way in life will make you better, no matter how repulsive they are to your senses. The first principle is stated in Proverbs. Love is stronger than death. Love, the verb, bestowing goodness and favor, is the strongest force in the universe. If you get this and submit to it (God even calls himself love!) and then interact with the worst circumstance swimming in love, you will create beauty from the confusion. That was the cross of Jesus, and him dying a horrific death to save our race, turning the very act of crucifixion into a doorway to eternal life. Love awakens love wherever it goes.
The second principle is about you. Jesus taught this universal law in Matthew. Simply put, everything that really impacts your life comes from within your own heart. In other words, your greatest obstacles will not be what you face externally, but what you face internally. It’s not what you’re forced to deal with that shapes you, after all, but how you choose to deal with what’s bearing down on your life. If you see yourself in the light of this teaching, suddenly stuff that triggers your deeper ugliness can be lauded a tool for exposing your need to heal and change, ultimately making you better.
What is so grand about this principle is that it removes the temptation to look to others to assign blame, which means you’ll have plenty of time and energy to see your own heart and your own need to grow and mature. It’s incredible how meaningful life’s worst circumstances become when we’re committed to acting in love--and are aware that if we’re not committed, we have a chance to grow. After all, there is enough love for the worst situation—Jesus made sure of that.
So what odd or irritating circumstances are you facing? Are you aware of how precious a learning experience this is? Like a good obstacle course, bad circumstances will stretch and grow you, pushing you to the limits of your ability to love and stay focused on your journey. It’s really that simple. Look into the face of whatever you’re stuck with right now, and you will see a lovely “soul mirror” that wants to reveal your blind spots and give you a good old fashioned opportunity to grow up. Pain is, as we all know, still one of the best tools for stimulating change in our lives.
So I say, bring on the tough circumstances, and I will be better for them. Sure they’re no fun at the time, but the payoffs are huge. Just read up on any great leader the world has known, and you’ll see a succession of tough situations that pruned that person into the grand tree they became. And then take a good, deep, loving look at your own history and ask yourself what you’ve learned from your tough stuff. Are you learning? Are you gleaning all you can? I hope so. Remember, just as you cannot have lemonade without lemons, you cannot have a mature character without hardship.
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