PURE JOY IN TIMES OF TRIAL!
Monday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
My dear encountered couples:
We all have bad days. Really bad days. Everything goes wrong. The alarm doesn’t go off, or we turn it off in our sleep, so we oversleep. The coffee tastes lousy, the milk in our cereal is sour, the car won’t start, and when we do get it going we run into the worst traffic jam of the century.
At home the vacuum cleaner backfires, shooting the last three weeks of dirt all over the living room, at work the computer system breaks down or accidentally you hit the wrong key and erase last week’s entries, at school Mary Sue or Bubba just passes you by without saying hello. Yes, we all have our bad days. Why? Maybe James has the answer in his letter.
“My brothers,” he writes, “count it pure joy when you are involved in every sort of trial. Realize that when your faith is tested this makes for endurance. Let endurance come to its perfection so that you may be fully mature and lacking in nothing.”
Our bad days are allowed by God for our good, to strengthen and mature our faith in him. They force us to turn to God for help or else lose our minds. The inconveniences, the disappointments, the mistakes and frustrations, when things don’t go according to our schedules, when life is not simple nor easy, all that is to make us realize how much we need God. Nobody, and I mean nobody can make it through any day without God. When we come to realize that, no matter what happens life will seem easier and more pleasant, at least more endurable.
When things go wrong consider it a blessing. God is showing he loves you. Show you love him by allowing him to step in and help you. Don’t only grin and bear it, but in the words of James: “Count it pure joy when you are involved in every sort of trial.” They are the sound of God knocking at your door.
