All joy

My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. – James 1.2-4

James begins with one of the most needed instructions in the word of God. It is needed because we all have trials and tribulations and testings and they are never easy. I don’t like them and sometimes I wonder why they happen. Life rarely goes the way I want it to go. When it doesn’t go my way my first response is rarely to count it ‘all joy.’ When the diverse temptations or various trials or multicoloured difficulties come my way I normally either balk, or fret, or argue, or freak out.

I like the fact that it addresses these trials as various trials because they can come in so many varieties. Sometimes they are physical. Sometimes they are financial. Sometimes they are emotional. Sometimes they hit you right in the face and sometimes they kind of sneak up on you.

No matter what, trials are not easy. I don’t even like to think back to that phone call, or that letter in the post, or that email or text or private message or whatever that shakes us to the core and takes our breath away. At the very moment I remember a phone call almost exactly five years ago that changed all of our lives.

The question comes in what we do when the initial shock wears off. Where does the news lead me when it has time to settle in?

Realistically, sadly, it is often anger or fear.

But here we read that our response should be to choose to count it as ‘all joy.’  ‘All joy’ only comes when we have the faith to trust that God is using those things for our own good. We trust that the present trials teach us how to wait on God. That patience does it works and makes us mature and we learn to trust God and His way.

If we could ever learn to look beyond the trials and could somehow look back and see what God does through them we could rejoice it what God has done. Sometimes we won’t know until we get to heaven.

But we can’t see that now. All we can see is the problem. Faith can be a difficult thing – but if I can trust God to save me, can’t I trust Him through the hard times? I rejoice in my salvation. Shouldn’t I rejoice when things are tough of I truly trust Him?