We don't always understand

Today's scripture mastery is Isaiah 55:8-9

 8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord.

 9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

We don't always understand why God allows things to happen.  Often when things that are difficult happen to us or to those that we love, we wonder why a God who is all knowing, and all powerful, and all loving would allow such things to happen.  It is because God has a much better perspective than we do.  He can see the end from the beginning.  He knows that while things may be difficult for us now, they can actually work to our benefit-even if we don't see why.  We must remember that this life is not the beginning or the end.  Sometimes we won't understand why certain things happened in this life until much later...sometimes not even until after we die.  But we can rest assured that God does love us, and that all these things are for our good.

A talk was given by Hugh B Brown that gives an analogy of pruning a currant bush to our understanding of God (The Currant Bush - New Era)

I was living up in Canada. I had purchased a farm. It was run-down. I went out one morning and saw a currant bush. It had grown up over six feet high. It was going all to wood. There were no blossoms and no currants. I was raised on a fruit farm in Salt Lake before we went to Canada, and I knew what ought to happen to that currant bush. So I got some pruning shears and went after it, and I cut it down, and pruned it, and clipped it back until there was nothing left but a little clump of stumps. It was just coming daylight, and I thought I saw on top of each of these little stumps what appeared to be a tear, and I thought the currant bush was crying. I was kind of simpleminded (and I haven’t entirely gotten over it), and I looked at it, and smiled, and said, “What are you crying about?” You know, I thought I heard that currant bush talk. And I thought I heard it say this: “How could you do this to me? I was making such wonderful growth. I was almost as big as the shade tree and the fruit tree that are inside the fence, and now you have cut me down. Every plant in the garden will look down on me, because I didn’t make what I should have made. How could you do this to me? I thought you were the gardener here.” That’s what I thought I heard the currant bush say, and I thought it so much that I answered. I said, “Look, little currant bush, I am the gardener here, and I know what I want you to be. I didn’t intend you to be a fruit tree or a shade tree. I want you to be a currant bush, and some day, little currant bush, when you are laden with fruit, you are going to say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Gardener, for loving me enough to cut me down, for caring enough about me to hurt me. Thank you, Mr. Gardener.’”

 We are often just like that current bush--we think that we know what is best, but God knows what he has in store for us.  He knows what our true potential is.  Let us put our trust in God, no matter what happens to us or those we love here in life.