Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Bad Things Don’t Get Better


“For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord…” (Ephesians 5:8, NIV 2011).

 Jim is big, the kind of big you-wonder-might-tip-over-your-examining-table when he sits on the end. I am following him for prostate cancer that has been quiescent, but on his last visit he was having new back pain. If it persisted, I was planning a bone scan.
“How’s your back today, Jim?”
“Much better. I changed mattresses on my bed and the pain just went away.”
“That’s good news. I didn’t think it was cancer but we were going to have to start looking if it hadn’t improved. But, with the pain gone, you’re okay. One thing I teach the young doctors I train—‘Bad things don’t get better,’ at least not on their own. I’m not worried about you anymore.”

 “Bad things don’t get better” is a good rule to help determine the need for diagnostic testing in healthcare; but, thank God, it’s not true with our personal lives.

It’s not true regarding my life before I knew Christ, lost from God in sin. God made that bad better on the cross.

It’s not true with the struggles I face on this day in my life, some caused by my continued self-centered living and some from the natural complications of a broken world. God’s presence in my life guarantees His working out all things for good, because I love him and am “called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28b, NIV 2011).

It does not have to be true for those who are poor and sick and lonely. Their bad can get better if I am willing to touch them in God’s name.

It does not have to be true for those who live separated from their Creator—those who, as Thoreau described, “lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” The cross of Christ is there for them as well. Their bad can get better, by God’s grace, if someone points the way.

In God’s plan, “bad things do get better” and often He counts on us to work with Him in making the change.

Dear God,
Thank you for making bad things better in my life. Today, let me be a part of your doing the same for others.
Amen

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