All Things Work Together

If you've read my blog much at all, you know I love to read... all kinds of books.  I'm currently reading a book by Karen Kingsbury, a Christian contemporary romance author.  She writes with a simplicity that makes her novels easy to fall into.  She also talks about what she knows, her life in fictitious interpretations, which to me is always good because it is believable.  Her husband is a high school coach, so a lot of her novels deal with that somehow, which is fun for me to read... as does the series I'm reading right now.  In this series, a Broadway actress and a high school football coach were in love... are still in love... but have gone their separate directions. I won't say anything else in case you want to go out and read the book, but I do want to highlight one of the key verses I read from the book tonight. 

"All Things Work together for them who love the Lord."- Romans 8:28 (my paraphrase).  In the book, the characters were using this verse to help them understand their circumstances.  And there  will always be circumstances we don't understand.  Death. Childhood cancer.  Abuse.  Neglect.  Crime and violence.  Drug abuse, and how it runs rampant.  Good people suffering, people who truly love God.  In my lifetime, I can remember a couple of instances where I looked at people who had died, and thought, "Why now, God?" People with small kids and family who loved them and who truly loved Christ, loved by example.  Now, as I've gotten older, I've read Isaiah 55- "My ways are not your ways".  And I know that God has a plan... He's promised us that in Jeremiah 29:11.  Those plans are the fulfillment of all things working together... for good... to them who love God.  To love God, we must seek Him.  We must follow His commandments- love one another and forgive.  We must humble ourselves and take up our cross daily... big steps for a fleshly girl who is proud, not humble.  As we love Him, though, and seek Him, we'll find him (Jeremiah 29:13).  We'll see that He truly does love us with an everlasting love.  A love that can't be taken away from us, even in times we don't understand.  A love that works everything for our good. 

If you keep reading Romans 8, there's a lot of promise there.  A promise that NOTHING can harm us, because God is for us (working for our good). A promise that there is no condemnation (thank You, Jesus, for justification... no condemnation because HE is our good).  A promise that NOTHING can separate us, not even those things we don't understand.  And in that working for good, we are MORE than conquerors (don't you just love that?). 
 "No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸ For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,^[k] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, ³⁹ neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord."- Romans 8;37-39
And that, my friend... is Him working all things for good.  God is good... all the time.