Sometimes life throws us curveballs. Sometimes things come up out of nowhere that we weren’t expecting. These curveballs and unexpected happenings can be good surprises, bad surprises, and sometimes a combination of both. We don’t always get to see the change coming, and we don’t always get to be the ones to decide what that change looks like, but we do get to decide how we will react to this change.
Whether it is through sickness, death, birth of new babies, moving to a new job, or any other number of factors we can be guaranteed our lives will not look the same a year from now as they do today. This kind of change can be difficult to deal with. It goes against the stability and comfort that we crave as humans. And yet, nothing new and exciting can happen in life if we don’t make way for change.
On Monday morning I was with one of our men’s community groups. We have been working through the book of Romans together and we came across verse 14 of chapter 15 on Monday where Paul says, “I myself am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness…” Paul was writing to a group of Christians in Rome that he had never met before, but he felt convinced they were all full of goodness.
Surely Paul did not mean to say that they are all perfect and never do anything wrong. I believe what Paul meant is that he is choosing to see all the good that is coming out of the church in Rome. He believes in their innate goodness because they are children of God. If you read the entire letter you can see that Paul does not bury his head in the sand and ignore some of the struggles and difficulties the Romans are facing, but he still chooses to focus on the good anyway.
Whatever change you are going through today might be in your control or it might not. But, what is always in your control is your perspective. You can choose to focus on the bad in everything or, like Paul, you can choose to focus on the goodness in every situation. Sometimes the glass is half full and sometimes it’s half empty. But, always, the glass is refillable.
