Trusting God Through Adversity

I read about an interesting experiment that was carried out recently by psychologist Jonathan Haidt. The participants were given a summary of a person’s life and asked to read it over. They were then asked to imagine that the person being described was their daughter. She hasn’t been born yet, but she will be soon and this is where her life is headed. Participants then had five minutes to edit her story. Using an eraser, they could eliminate whatever they wanted out of her life. The question for the participants was: What do you erase first? Most of us would instinctively begin to erase the bad things like a learning disability, the car accident, and the financial challenges that were on the page. We love our children and want them to live a life without those types of hardships, pains, and setbacks. 

We would all prefer our children’s lives be free from pain and anguish. But ask yourself: Is that really what’s best? Take a moment and think about it. Does life experience tell you that a privileged life is really going to make our kids happy? What if you erase a difficult circumstance that would have woke them up to their need for prayer? What if you erase a hardship that’s going to teach them how to be joyful in spite of bad circumstances? What if you erase some pain and suffering that ends up being the very thing that God uses in their life to cause them to cry out to Him? 

Today, as we continue our study of the Book of Ecclesiastes, we find Solomon wrestling with this very same issue. Why does God allow so much adversity and pain? Through today’s passage, we learn an important truth: Knowing God’s in control allows us to look for what’s good, even when things look bad.