The battle to trust that God is good?

That's not just a question an unbeliever asks is it?  It is a question that as believers we revisit and wrestle with again and again and again.  Do I believe and trust in the goodness of God when suffering hits?  When I lose my job?  When church is a struggle?  When I face ridicule for my faith?  When I can't have children? When I fail my exams?  When I am still single?  When my spouse dies?  Is God good?

Is God good when I am declared to be in remission, is he still good when I am told the cancer has come back?  Is God only good when his will aligns with my will?  When my kingdom meshes with his kingdom?  Does God's goodness look different now than it did for believers in the 16th Century or 19th Century or in Africa or South America today?  Or is God at root just good in an unchanging eternally reliable way?

If you are really honest how would you answer those questions.  Just take a minute or two to read back over them and ask yourself that question in each and every one of those situations.  Take a few minutes to pray through your answers with God, be honest, he knows anyway.

I've come to realise over the last couple of months, yet again, that my grasp of the goodness of good is situationally and circumstantially slippery at best.  God's goodness is not slippery, but my grasp on it is.  It's not that God's goodness is like a bar of wet soap, but that my hands (and heart) are covered in fairy liquid as I try to hold on to God's goodness in the face of changing circumstances.

I've been reading through Jeremiah Burroughs 'The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment', let me be honest it's be a slog, but a profitable one.  Because it has challenged me again to face up to my lack of contentment because of my lack of a firm enough grasp on the goodness of God.  At one point in the book Burroughs encourages his congregation to sit and write two lists, one beside the other with your struggles and blessings in columns alongside each other.  He strips life down to our utter dependence on God for everything and thus encourages us to see everything as blessing, but also confronts us with our predisposition for feeling enviously entitled to what we see others having.

I've been feeling this especially in the area of ministry over the last few weeks.  As we've faced up to 5 of our congregation moving away with work it has felt hard.  Losing more than a tenth of your church family is painful.  Especially hard on the heals of other loses over the last year.  It is hard to be content, until Burroughs has reminded me what God has given me that is eternal and everlasting and of so much more value.

God is good even as people move away.  God is good as our leadership gets smaller.  God is good as personally we say goodbye to good friends and feel the pain of that.  God is good as God's answer to our prayers to send us more workers seems to be to take some of the current ones away.  God is good because it is his church not mine, his mission not mine, his gospel that we proclaim for his glory not mine.  And God cares more about all those things than I do at my very best.  God is good because ehe has proven he is historically and eternally.  Sometimes we need to wrestle with that until we come to the point where we can say it and believe it is both true and real again.