CAPITALIZING ON CALAMITIES

 

   The ancient Psalmist wrote, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted—“(Psalms 119:71). Is that not amazing? Some might even question his sanity. With our tendency to despise trouble, it is seldom that we find a person who feels this way.

   As the writer looked back over his past, and considered his calamities, he concluded that they had been good for him. He doesn’t give us any details. He mentions no dark valleys, rugged mountains, or raging seas that he was forced to face. He just gathers all the painful experiences together into one bundle and labels it affliction.

   Maybe it’s best that we don’t know the exact nature of his trials, lest we think ours to be unique because they aren’t on his list. Perhaps we would think his to be more bearable than ours. The truth is that we all have troubles in some form or another that seem unbearable at the time.  Although we live in a different time and place we have something in common with this man and every other person.  Job put it like this:  “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble” (Job 14:1).  Life for all of us is a mixture of sunshine and shadows, pleasure and pain, mountains and valleys, comfort and calamities.  It’s the same for us all, the difference is in how we deal with them.  Some become bitter and some become better.

            Those who accept their afflictions with the right attitude turn their pain into pleasure, their cross into a crown, their hurt into help.  They capitalize on their calamity and it becomes a cure rather than a curse.

            Trials will surely come to us all, but they need not wreck our lives.  When the storms of life rage against us, when dreadful diseases drain our bodies of much needed energy, and when the ugly monster death rips out of our hands the things we cherish most, we can still cling to the precious promises of Romans 8:28 “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to this purpose.”  So, even when it seems that all is lost and there appears to be no hope, we can capitalize on our calamity and say with the Psalmist, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted—.”  Think about it!