THROUGH THE RAIN TO THE RAINBOW

Sitting having coffee in a Christian Café one afternoon, I was taken by a childs picture stuck to the counter.  There were flowers and grass and a rainbow, and the caption said.  You cant get to the rainbow but through the rain.  It is so true of life, often when things are going wrong one thing after another, we can slump into the pits, wondering where  God is and if he really has our best interest at heart.  But, for anything to grow it needs balance, water, sun, fertilizer.  However, it is the fertilizer part that most of us don’t like, when really if our life was all sunshine and lollipops, we would become a bit soft like Marie Antoinette.  When the Queen was told that the people had no bread, she responded with the famous line ‘Let them eat cake’.  When things are easy all the time, we lose touch with the real world, we would have no empathy for people that are going through difficulties.  Jesus himself went through everything himself, so that we couldn’t say, ‘well He has no idea what it is like to be going through what I am going through’.  Jesus knew what it was like to have what we call good days.  People shouting Hosanna! And throwing palms in His path as He rode through the street, Hailing Him as a King.  Then bad days, when he was abused, beaten, rejected, gossiped about, wrongly accused and denied by friends he had cooked breakfast for on the beach.  2 Corinthians 2:14 says that God always leads us in triumph, that what we go through will, if we don’t turn bitter but draw closer to God, cause us to give off more of the fragrance of Christ.  Like pressing a rose the more we press in to Christ the more of His fragrance we will carry with us into our work place, our Church, our family, our World.