God is good.  When we were children, we recited that three word phrase like little robots, smiling up at the person requiring us to do so (or perhaps staring fearfully at that person!).  It takes a lifetime of experience to find out that it is absolutely so.  God is infinitely kind and gracious and good.  Everything that He does is good.  He only allows good. He is only good all the time.  You can say it many ways and sometimes you need to say it a lot in order to understand how deep it goes.  A lot of people may say that God is good out of one side of their mouth and then with the other side they accuse Him of all the evil in the world and all the misery that they see around them.  God, why this and why that.  However, even so, God is only good and that is true all the time.

We only have to open our eyes.  When our many times great grandfather Adam sinned, he immediately forgot God’s goodness and hid from God.  Why was he so fearful?  God had not changed.  The only change was Adam’s sin.   Since that time, God has been forced into the position of being apparently overbearing and even scary at times in order to make man keep the commandments and do good.  Mankind most of the time won’t do it unless there’s something to be afraid of.  In spite of all of the wars, famine and trouble, God is still good one hundred percent of the time.  For each individual living on this earth, He is always thinking of ways to get that individual to return and come back to Him.  He knows that the person’s eternal happiness depends on him  returning to his Father, so He is creating situations in each person’s life to help that person to return to the place where he/she will be blessed.  Some people are not listening and will not do it in this lifetime.  God still doesn’t give up.

God is like the best mother.  A true mother will never give up on her children.  She loves them unconditionally and prays always for their well being.  She will go to her grave at times praying for them and always wishing them the best.  She can find something to love even in the unlovable.  I learned this at my mother-in-law’s funeral.  Her eldest, and most rebellious, son stood up and spoke for a few minutes and he talked about his most precious moments with his mother.  Knowing her, I knew that in spite of his frustrating and uncanny ability to alienate absolutely everyone, she loved him and saw goodness in him.  He made her laugh.

God is like that kind of mother’s love.  He loves each one of us unconditionally, but yet He knows when we are doing things that are hurting our eternal happiness and He creatively goes about leading us into situations that will help us to change that characteristic or that habit.  Yes, God is good.  He is wonderful.  I see His hand in little situations in my life that I thought were annoying, but in the end I find out that those were the situations that brought about the most growth in my life.

A little example of that happened to me last week.  I’ve been trying to pull off a refinance all summer long.  Dealing with the banks these days is completely frustrating and many things have happened along the way.  The other day I was trying to fax some documents to the refinance company and my fax machine was not working properly.  I tried everything and still it kept spitting out error notices, seemingly just to aggravate me more.  Finally, I realized that there was no way on earth that it was going through and so I decided to drive over there and drop the papers off.  As I drove over there, I began to think about a recent prayer where I said that I wanted to stop being such a big complainer.  Ka-ching!!  Wow!  This was a perfect situation to try out my new resolve to stop complaining!  Up until then I was complaining big time about my wasted time and the wasted gas, the frustration, etc.  The new realization brought a smile to my face.  As I paused at a stop sign, my phone rang – it was the mortgage secretary saying that the faxes (probably a pile of them!) had finally come through.  Yes, God is good and He just wants us to turn back to Him.  He works overtime in each of our lives to create situations so that we will get the message and change.