The Given Good

I just finished listening to a book on tape by S. Michael Wilcox called “Receiving Divine Help When Your Prayers Seem Unanswered.” It was given to me by a very dear friend and it touches on so many great topics. Most of it has to do with perspective on life and towards the end he quotes C.S. Lewis. You’ll have to forgive me cause I was too lazy to look up the exact quote on the internet and just typed it out as I heard it on the cd so some of the punctuation and wording might be incorrect. Anyway, C.S. Lewis says…

“You can not in your present state understand eternity. But you can get some likeness of it if you say that both good and evil when they are full-grown become retrospective. All this earthly past will have been heaven to those who are saved and all their life on earth too will then be seen by the damned to have been hell. That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering ‘no future bliss can make up for it.’ Not knowing that heaven once attained will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And they say of some sinful pleasure let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences, little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take in the quality of heaven and the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why at the end of all things when the sun rises here and twilight turns to blackness down there, the blessed will say we have never lived anywhere but in heaven. And the lost will say we were always in hell….and both will be right.”

He talks a lot also about the given good versus the expected good. Everything that comes from God is good. If we ask for bread, he will not give us a stone. Now it might not be the specific KIND of bread we asked for. We may have asked for white and he gave us wheat, but it is still bread and it is still good. Thus the wheat bread is the given good and the white bread is the expected good. I thought of how many times I have become bitter and ungrateful for the given good in my life because it wasn’t what I expected, exactly how I wanted it, or in the time frame I hoped to receive it. I fail to recognize that it is a blessing to have everything exactly the way it is (assuming that you are doing high-quality things with you life).

Some specific examples of common mind frames I could think of to help you with personal application might be men who pray to support their families and are blessed with a different kind of work than they had anticipated. Women who pray for jobs and are blessed with the occupation of motherhood. Young men who pray to serve a fruitful mission and come back having baptized not one, yet planted many unseen seeds. Parents who pray to have children of their own and receive them through adoption. Young children who pray for their parents to stay together yet don’t experience a whole home until they are fathers and mothers of their own families. All are given goods which we should be thankful for yet sometimes we sulk in sorrow because it’s not what we expected. It’s been an eye opening experience for me to try and forget the expected good and try harder to see the given good that God has blessed me with.

I give S. Michael Wilcox 4 stars in my book and would recommend his material to all.