Happenings 14/10/2021

Writer, Arthur Gordon, writes: Last summer in California, I met a man who had been a skydiver until, on his nineteenth jump, his parachute failed to open fully and his emergency chute wrapped itself around the partially collapsed main chute. He slammed into a dry lake bed at sixty miles an hour. Doctors thought this broken remnant of a man would never leave his hospital bed. They told him so, and he sank into a bleak despair. But in the hospital he had frequent visits from another patient, a man whose spinal cord had been severed in an automobile accident. This man would never walk, would never, in fact, move a finger again. But he was always cheerful. “I certainly don’t recommend my situation to anyone,” he would say. “And yet I can read, I can listen to music, I can talk to people …” 

And yet ...

... those two words shift the focus from what has been lost to what remains – and to what may still be gained. They gave such hope and determination to the skydiver that he came through his ordeal and today walks without a limp.

At one point, Paul writes a letter to a church describing the pains he went through so that others may get to know God better. He describes himself as: Dying ... Beaten...  Sorrowful...  Poor...  Having nothing. And he had gone through all that. He had been attacked and left for dead. He had been shipwrecked. He had lost his income and he did know poverty. But against every one of those bad things, against every one of those disasters that I would probably look at and go “poor me”, Paul turns on the power of two words – “And Yet”.

[We are ] dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed;  sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything. (2 Corinthians 6:9-10)

When you add the ‘And yet’, you start looking at life with the eyes of faith. You make room for God in the picture. You are saying, “You know what? Things are pretty bad, but here are some awesome things in my life that haven’t changed.

• God is real – God is good. He loves me.
• He holds me in his hand.
• This is all worth it because we are living for eternity.
• God can use this stuff to make me more like him.
• And I’m gonna praise Him for that.”

It’s the same attitude that a guy called Habakkuk had 700 years before Paul wrote his words:

Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will be joyful in God my Savior.

Where do you need to apply, 'And Yet' in your life today?

In Him,
Murray