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Jeremiah 29:11 NLT

“For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.”

When starting out upon my Christian life as a 19-year-old, I began full of enthusiasm and expectation. I presumed my life would run smoothly and I’d achieve my goals and, because of my faith, avoid calamity. My naivety and arrogance astound me today. Yet, for some, God remains little more than an eternal slot machine where we are chosen to be winners. All the bad stuff is somehow to do with sin and affects the wicked and not the ‘righteous’.

Of course, the wheels came off my world view some 17 years after becoming a Christian. Crisis hit, well beyond my emotional and spiritual ability to respond in any other than a chaotic way. My learning began with an argument – how had the devil hijacked my life? There was little framework for considering this might be the plans God had for me.

My crisis as Katey struggled with her MS was that I only had space for tunnel vision. I, or at most, my marriage, was all I could see before me. This was not of my choosing. This was not a pleasant or faith-building experience. What’s more, where on earth did this fit in the plans God had for me and Katey?

As the years passed, I began to reflect upon the selfishness of my absorption with my own trouble in a world consumed with pain. I was weeping for myself, yet failing to recognise the many who were weeping over far more demanding and challenging circumstances.

I needed to reframe this experience. If this was God’s plan for our life together, then I needed to embrace this purpose. And embrace it positively, not merely as a passive victim. I needed to return to the feet of Jesus and rethink who I was and who God was. My understanding of obedience, of service and of faithfulness required radical reappraisal. It was a difficult and yet liberating process; yet one that brought us both so much closer to God and surrounded us with the peace of Christ, and helped us to grow up.

QUESTION: How hard do you find it to try to see the world through another’s eyes?

PRAYER: Heavenly Father, may your peace guard my heart and mind, whatever happens in my life.