Beloved Friend,
There is something I now do when a friend hurts me or does something that catches me off guard. Before I let the offense settle in and make itself comfortable, I do this thing where I almost argue with myself. I go, no, wait. This person was not always like this, then I start rehearsing. The times they showed up, were kind, the times they went out of their way and all that good stuff. I know people change but I make room for the possibility that they had a bad day, that something happened, that this moment is not the full picture of who they are.
It is a small act but it is actually an intentional one. You are training your heart. Refusing to let one bad moment rewrite the entire history. Choosing to remember accurately rather than just emotionally.
We do this with people we love, with family, with friends, with colleagues. Any relationship that has history has both good and difficult in it and learning to hold both without letting the difficult swallow the good whole is genuinely something you have to practice. It does not always come naturally. The bad can be loud. The bad wants to be the headline. The bad will absolutely volunteer to be the thing you remember most if you let it.
You have to train your heart. You go back, and you remember.
So how much more should we be doing this with God.
The One who Scripture describes as perpetually, unchangingly good. Not good when things are going well and absent when they are not. Not good by our own shifting definitions of what goodness should look like, but good in the way that only a being of infinite wisdom and infinite love can be. Which means sometimes His goodness does not look like what we asked for. Sometimes it looks like the thing we were actively hoping to avoid.
I think about a child being taken for immunization. At that moment, from the child’s perspective, the parent has betrayed them. You brought me here. You are allowing this to happen to me. This is not what good looks like, and the parent is watching this and thinking, no, this is precisely what good looks like. This is me being responsible for your future.
We do not always have the full picture of what God is doing. However, we have the record of what He has done, and that record is the thing worth training our hearts to hold onto.
I started doing something when God comes through for me, and He always does. I tell Him, please do not let me forget this. I say it like a prayer because I mean it like one. Cause I know myself. I know that three difficult months from now, when something is pressing in and the noise is loud, my heart will want to forget. My mind will want to zoom in on the present hardship and make it feel like the whole story. I need something anchored deeper than my current feelings to pull me back.
His track record.
Here is the truth. Life is not always going to be rosy and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Scripture is actually very honest about this. Count it all joy when you face trials. Blessed are those who suffer for righteousness. In this world you will have tribulation. These are not warnings that slipped into the Bible by accident. They are there because difficulty is part of the landscape and God never pretended otherwise. Rain falls on the just and the unjust. Seasons change. There will be sunshine and there will be storms and the storms are not evidence that God has left the building.
Training your heart to remember changes what the storm does to you.
It does not make the storm smaller. It just means the storm does not get to rewrite everything you know to be true. It means when things are hard you can say, He was good to me in that season, and that season, and that one too. This thing will not be the one that ends me. It may be difficult, it may be an inconvenience, it may genuinely be terrible, but I have a God who has a long and consistent history of coming through. I do not see why this time would be the exception.
That is not denial or pretending the valley is a mountain. It is just refusing to stay in the valley without your history.
Psalm 16:6 says the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. I hold onto that. Even the things that do not look pleasant right now, I trust that they are still falling into place. That the God who has spoken to storms before will speak to this one. That it will be good again, because it has been good before, because He is good, always.
Train your heart, Beloved. Not to ignore what is hard but to remember what is true. Go back over the record. Remind yourself. Write it down if you have to. Tell God, do not let me forget this moment.
The storms will come, but so has He. Every single time.
That is worth remembering.
With thoughts of kindness,
ABBA’s Shofar.