I work in high end furniture sales, and as you can well imagine, times have been hard the last few years. My income has dropped over 70%, and most of my co-workers have seen similar declines. The fear and concern is almost palpable. The sales people talk - only partially in jest - about buying RV's and parking them on a communally owned piece of property. They would share everything, and everyone would have a skill. One would be the cook, one the gardener, one the handy man, one the house cleaner. They would literally circle their wagons against the darkness, uncertainty, and despair of life in this economy.
All the sales people in my store are dependent on someone walking through the door who needs furniture, and - here's the rub - is willing to pony up and pay for it. One of my friends, who is a believer in Jesus like me, had a great customer the other day. A woman came in who had just sold her home and all the furniture in it, and she now wanted to buy all new furniture for her new home. It was my friend's turn in the rotation, so she got this customer. She was so grateful to God. She said "God is so good!"
Hmmph....? Was she saying God is so good because He did this really good thing for her?
My friend did what we do in our job; she went out to the client's home, measured all her rooms, talked with her about exactly what she wanted, went to her old house to see how she had furnished that, and then spent about 8 hours getting a presentation all ready for this client who said that she would come in on Saturday, checkbook in hand, to buy everything. On Saturday the client came in as promised. But instead of checkbook in hand, she was carrying ads from the newspaper. Ads from other furniture companies. Ads that she pointed to and said "I really like this, and its a lot cheaper than your store. And I'm really old and don't really care about the quality....." blah blah blah woof woof woof...... She left our store without buying a single item, and my friend, who had two days worth of time into this lady earned exactly zero dollars. Nada. Zip. (Well, at the end of the month she would be paid minimum wage for those hours.)
How did she respond? First she said, "I need some chocolate." Then she said, "God is so good".
That is faith.
The last couple decades of my life have been full of failures, funks, even foreclosure. I started those decades firmly believing God is good. But by 2010, when our little U-haul, loaded with everything we owned, pulled out of the driveway of the little house that had represented our life savings, the little house that now belonged to the bank, I had quit believing that God was good in any way that was meaningful in my life. I believed theologically that He was good. I knew that His goodness would eventually triumph in this world. But in the "rubber meets the road" nitty gritty details of my life, I could not see that his goodness was making any difference.
Talk about a funk. But God has been teaching me that the truth of His goodness DOES make a difference in my life every day. The missing ingredient in my walk with God was faith. Faith takes the truth of God and rests in it, regardless our cirumstances, regardless of what I see at the moment. "We look not at the things which are seen, but the things that are unseen. For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things that are unseen are eternal." Pie in the sky, you say? Well, let's discuss that.
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