THE WELL OF MOST FLOW

If life were a drink to you, what flavor would it be? Would it be sour or sweet? Would it taste great, but sicken your stomach?

These are the kinds of questions that often come from the positivism advocates I suppose. They relate what happens in life to your attitude. And there is merit to that view to some degree, yet the life of faith is not one live perfectly or always good or bad regardless of your attitude.

It may affect who you view what happens, but trust is not an issue of something God grants to happen in our life because he necessarily wants us to enjoy it. Happiness may come with the experience, but that isn't the priority.

I can't speak for others, but I have notices in my life that it seems to go in cycles. Sometimes that is a flow that changes from hour to hour. Not that I enjoy the twists and turns, but I have observed it is the way a day or week or even longer can transpire.

Sooner or later in the course of events I will stop to ask the most important question. Mainly what is it that God wishes me to learn from this moment or event.

I do hope along the way that I don't avoid the obvious. I recall seeing a cartoon once where a guy was in a sinking row boat and dressed for fishing. The capacity had him asking, "Lord was me running over a rock and my boat sinking your way of telling me I should have gone to church on Sunday instead of fishing?"

I'm not trying to suggest that God would have taken that approach. I just saying that I know there are times when we will ignore the facts for one reason or another.

In that regard as far as my life goes there have been a great many times when I have come to some crossroads and prayed for the Lord's wisdom to help make a choice. In some cases the right choice was obvious, in others not so.

I do know, however, that the Lord has certainly made it very clear when I needed to go a certain direction. And yet I also know there have been times when I resisted because I wanted a different path. How easy it is to excuse our lack of obedience.

I am grateful for the many times that God has been merciful to me in such situations. And I have discovered the times when my first instinct in a given situation may have seemed to be wrong. That the consequences that followed often made it seem like it was a wrong choice.

Yet later, sometimes weeks or months later I find out my first instinct was in fact the right one.

Too many people love to play the prophet. They love to say I told you so. But I know that with the Lord, the well of most flow is the one that occurs over a life time and not just in one second. Hopefully we can remember it as needed when face with some change that makes us question what in our hearts we know was God's will.