When Life Doesn’t Make Sense

When my granddaughter Stella was a toddler, I took her to a frozen yogurt store. She had been learning to wipe her mouth with a napkin, and it was fun to watch her take a bite of yogurt and then wipe her mouth. But then she saw a napkin on the sidewalk and reached down to pick it up.

“Stella, no!” I said. “That’s a dirty napkin. Let’s get you a clean napkin.”

She looked at me in confusion. She didn’t understand why that napkin wasn’t good enough. But I understood because I was a little wiser than she was.

The same is true of our relationship with God. He is wiser than we are. And when God tells us not to do something, it’s for a good reason.

Even if we’re going through something difficult right now, we must realize that God loves us. The apostle Paul wrote, “For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever!” (2 Corinthians 4:17 NLT).

Satan, however, will challenge this truth. That was the case with Job, whose friends basically said, “God must not love Job. Otherwise, these calamities wouldn’t have befallen him. Job must have committed some gross sin.”

Yet the very opposite was true. God said of Job, “He is the finest man in all the earth. He is blameless—a man of complete integrity. He fears God and stays away from evil” (Job 1:8 NLT).

Satan used the same approach in the Garden of Eden when he said to Eve, in effect, “If God really loved you, He would let you eat from any tree in the garden.” But that was a lie.

We must realize that God loves us and is always looking out for our eternal benefit