Over the past few months (years even) I have had flashbacks to my past. While some memories have been good ones, some haven’t. I look back at opportunities squandered, hurts suffered, past failures and rejections and conundrums that remain unresolved to this day and when thinking along these lines, it has been rather depressing.

But I think also as a Christian believer who takes the Bible seriously, believes God has a wonderful purpose for my life (and for all who turn to Him), has called me as His instrument to help carry out His grand purposes for this world, and who believes the past should be consigned to the past and with God it can be truly buried.

Many lessons have been learned the hard way and every day I am learning new things. I sometimes wonder what might have been if I knew then (going back to my birth) what I knew now. One thing that never ceases to amaze me is how fickle and flawed we humans are, yet on the positive side how resilient and resourceful and full of potential for greatness. The greatest wonder is God persists with us.

Few experienced intimacy with the Almighty as Moses did but when Moses asked God to show him His glory, the best he got was a passing glimpse, but even that was more than awesome. My own personal experience with God has been that He shows us what he wants to show us, in His time, as is necessary, when we’re ready.

Right now there is much I can’t quite figure out but one thing I do know that can’t be taken away is: “I am my beloved and he is mine” (Song of Solomon 2:16). There is much around us that doesn’t make sense, including innocent suffering, bad guys getting the upper hand and a sense life is too much sometimes, a lot of the time, to bear.

If God were to tell us everything all at once then we wouldn’t be able to take it in or bear it and it could be precisely for that reason He doesn’t and tells us simply to trust and obey and if we do we become the people he wants us to be. We do so knowing that one day we will fully know as we are fully known. Maybe on a human level, that ought to be something to bear in mind when letting rip to whoever as to what we really think of them and on all sorts of subjects.

So it is back to our text, which like many texts in the Bible can easily be taken out of context. Considering words at face value though: “all things” means all things; “work together for good” incredible as it seems means just that; “them that love God” refer to them that love God. “them who are the called according to his purpose” tells us there is a purpose behind it all. While not always obvious, especially at the time, we need to hold the faith for it wins through in the end.