Daily Lesson for August 22, 2014

Today's Daily Lesson comes from Job 2:10:

"Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?”

A truth we must face in this life is that nothing is guaranteed.  If we go on living life as if the world or God owes us something then one day we are sure to be terribly disappointed. We can live life thinking if we are good boys or good girls then nothing bad will happen to us or our families; but bad things do happen to good people -- then what?

One of my childhood pastors John Claypool showed me how to accept life on its own terms with strength and grace. Before coming to our church John lost his little girl Lara Lou.  Afterward, he wrote a book about his journey in which he told about how one night in the throes of his own grief and unable to sleep he got up from bed and went and pulled down a commentary on Abraham's binding of Isaac by Gerhardt Van Rod. John said up until that night he had always held that story at some distance, as though it were something vestigial from an ancient pagan time and practice where parents sacrificed their children to placate their gods. But reading Van Rod's commentary opened for John a new way of understanding the story that night. John said Van Rod revealed a new meaning to the story, as it asked Abraham whether he remembered "where Isaac came from, that life is gift, that birth is windfall, and that all is finally coming to us from grace? Or had he gotten possessive of something that had first of all belonged to God?" 

That night set John down the path of healing he continued to walk all the days of his life. And as he walked, he showed the rest of us the way.

Life is gift; to accept it we must accept it with its terms and with its conditions and its very limited guarantees. But accept it we must.