Ministers Blogs
“Struggles in life”
Categories: Christian PrinciplesTonk Talk by Mark T. Tonkery
A little girl walking in a garden noticed a particularly beautiful flower. She admired its beauty and enjoyed its fragrance. “It’s so pretty!” she exclaimed. As she gazed on it, her eyes followed the stem down to the soil in which it grew. “This flower is too pretty to be planted in such dirt!” she cried. So she pulled it up by its roots and ran to the water faucet to wash away the soil. It wasn’t long until the flower wilted and died.
When the gardener saw what the little girl had done, he exclaimed, “You have destroyed my finest plant!”
“I’m sorry, but I didn’t like it in that dirt,” she said. The gardener replied, “I chose that spot and mixed the soil because I knew that only there could it grow to be a beautiful flower.”
Often we murmur because of the circumstances into which God has placed us. We fail to realize that He is using our pressures, trials, and difficulties to bring us to a new degree of spiritual beauty.
The Apostle Paul reminds in 2 Corinthians 5:1-7, “For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee. So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, not by sight.”
Christian there will be struggles, trails, temptations, and moments of pain in this life. It is important to develop and maintain a Christian attitude in the midst of our suffering. Remember in Romans 8:37 “… in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
The only survivor of a shipwreck was washed up on a small, uninhabited island. Every day, he prayed intently for God to rescue him, but it seemed He just wasn’t listening. He eventually managed to build himself a hut out of driftwood to protect him from the weather and store what few possessions he had managed to salvage. Then, one day after scavenging for food, he arrived ‘home’ to find his hut was on fire after being struck by lightning. The worst he could imagine had happened. Everything he had was lost. He would surely just give up and die now.
“God, how could you do this to me!?” he cried.
Early the next morning, as he lie on the shore distraught, he was startled by a group of men who had arrived by boat to rescue him.
“How did you know I was here?” he asked.
They replied, “We saw your smoke signal.”
It is so easy to get discouraged when things are going wrong and we are facing many trials. We may even blame God for the things that happen, or complain because He doesn’t answer our prayers in the way we want Him to. But God is always at work in our lives, even in the midst of pain and suffering. Remember, next time ‘your hut is burning’...it may be a ‘smoke signal’ given by the grace of God. He loves you and cares for you even if you can’t always see it.
