SOMETIMES OUR BEST DAYS AND OUR WORST DAYS ARE THE SAME DAYS

Isn't life exhaustingly wonderful?  I love right now!  There are a lot of prisoners who would like to have my worst days and I would like to have a lot of lottery winners' best days!  There it is...life!

Today I encourage you to take personal inventory.  Like who you are, where you are, what you face, and God's gentle leading hand as you experience the wonder of confusion as well as clarity.  Sometimes our best days and our worst days are the same days.

This morning I was reading a simply divine book that gives me great energy.  Of course it reflects my constant nature to want to uncover the hope in a stressful circumstance.  While these exact words weren't in print, I noted on my phone the comment, Don't ever be afraid to hope.

Why would anyone be afraid to hope?  Well, I know the answer because I've toyed with such fear.  I have been afraid to hope because maybe that hope wouldn't come about.  The result would be that I falsely built up a possibility only to be let down.  If I wouldn't hope then I wouldn't be disappointed was my rationale.

Yet hope is that mysterious element of the God-encounter.  As long as there is God, there will always be hope.  Fact.  Period.  The Bible's cover to cover exposure reveals that this is His story.

Normal days.  Impossible trouble.  Unexplainable deliverance.  This is a constant thread of the God-message.

Thirty-seven years ago this month, Mary and I were in some of our worst days.  We had agreed to move from our beloved congregation in Quincy, IL (that had converted us and then eventually made me their preacher for two wonderfully profound years) to a church in Tulsa where we knew not one individual.  Those were stark and dark days.

After we limped into Tulsa with our three littles and a U-Haul full of junk furniture, Mary and I cried for six solid weeks.  For 40 days we suffered anguish, disappointment, resentment, and incredibly deep disjointed questions as to what in the world had God done to us.  Those were some of the worst days of our lives.

Furthermore, it was a very painful next 18 years.  Church legalism, my own narrowness, brotherhood criticism; all and more led me to hours in my office or stretched across my bed in tears.  Maybe we should have returned Quincy where I would try to get a job as a shoe salesman.  I desperately considered it.

But I must rush to say that the next 19 years have been remarkably the opposite. God seemed to have known what He was doing.  Surprise!  He endured with us.  A few in the church endured with us while the vast majority fled my inept and shallow ways.  And I'm grateful for all of it.

Now I can look back with clarity of hindsight and vouch for you in your many serious struggles that for certain sometimes our best days and worst days are the same days.  I needed the rugged terrain of my first 18 years at Memorial Drive to deeply marvel at the last 19 years.

God always has a grip on our moments.  He is never done turning the water into wine. So wherever you are, drink up!  Don't let the cup of sorrow pass without assurance God can shock the world with what He chooses to do with you.  The empty tomb is our signal to break into huge smiles.

Whether is looks like a good day or a bad day....in kingdom jargon....it is a YES!