Don't Despair by Craig Hill

Don’t Despair

By Craig Hill

Last week I got dehydrated on the second night of our duck hunting trip and woke up shaking uncontrollably in my sleeping bag in our tent on an island on a river. We paddled our canoes out the next afternoon. Then we came down with salmonella poisoning and lay around recovering instead of going back out and completing what was supposed to be 6 days of uninterrupted hunting. We’d planned that hunt for a year. But it was not to be.

Yesterday I got a call from two consultants who work for my new business. They just started last week and were supposed to be on the project generating some nice professional fees for us for about a year. But the call came that said they were dismissed from the project because they didn’t fit in with the rest of the team. That’s about $160,000 of gross profit gone in one phone call.

Last Saturday night there was a neighborhood called Richmond Hill in Indianapolis where people expected a calm end to their day and maybe a good night’s sleep. Instead a huge explosion erased 3 homes, killed two people, and literally knocked a number of homes off their foundations. That makes my setbacks minor in comparison. (Read the book of Job if you want more on this.)

Are we to despair when life doesn’t meet our expectations? King Solomon said the following in Ecclesiastes Chapter 3, verses 9 to 14:

What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race.1He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end. I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God. I know that everything God does will endure forever; nothing can be added to it and nothing taken from it. God does it so that people will fear him.

And in Romans 8:28 Paul wrote:

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

We must trust in the Lord. We must take the bad with the good. We must have faith and hope in God who loves us so much that He sacrificed His only Son so that we might have the hope of life everlasting. If you don’t have this peace which passes all understanding, talk to someone who does. Seek the Lord, repent from your sins, and confess that Jesus is the Christ.

As Solomon says in the end of Ecclesiastes:

Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body. Now all has been heard; here is the conclusion of the matter:

Fear God and keep his commandments,

for this is the duty of all mankind.

For God will bring every deed into judgment,

including every hidden thing,

whether it is good or evil.