Friday: A Thing of Beauty Wrapped around Trouble
WEEK 21
FRIDAY
A THING OF BEAUTY WRAPPED AROUND TROUBLE
2 Corinthians 6:4-10
We ended yesterday with the question as to how a faith with a cross at its heart could offer exemption from suffering when the purest heart that ever beat was not exempt. But Jesus, while not exempt, was not passive in suffering. He took hold of this injustice and made something of it—turned it into redemption. When one can take hold of the worst thing that can happen to one—the cross—and turn it into the best thing that can happen to the world—its redemption—that is mastery of the very highest type ever exhibited upon our planet.
This mastery of unjust suffering was not a lone and unique thing—a lone star in the firmament—Jesus passed this power of mastery over to his disciples and their spiritual children. It became a characteristic of the Christian movement and of the individual Christian. They seemed to have the strange power to transform everything—good, bad, and indifferent—into something else, something better.
This power to transform the worst into the best is seen in a Philippian jail where Paul and Silas were in an inner prison with bleeding backs, and their hands and feet in stocks. What for? They had done nothing to deserve it; it was injustice from beginning to end. Did they whine and complain that God wasn’t good, that God didn’t take care of God’s own? No, at midnight they prayed and sang hymns. One can understand the praying, for they were in a tight spot; but the singing of hymns—well, that showed a victorious mastery that was breathtaking. And they struck such high soprano notes that God had to bring in the earthquake for a bass! The jailer was converted before morning, and the foundations of a church were laid. Then Paul, writing to that church in later years, gives us one of the most beautiful epistles in our Bible, the Epistle to the Philippians. And that epistle specializes in joy. This was no cheap joy—joy in gifts and circumstances—it was a joy born out of the heart of pain and sorrow. It was like a pearl, “a thing of wonderful beauty wrapped around trouble.”*
O Lord, I thank you for the power to face everything and to make something beautiful out of everything ugly, to make something sweet out of everything sour. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Opposition shall be my opportunity—my opportunity to reveal the love of Christ.
*Attributed to Presbyterian minister and Chaplain of the United States Senate, Dr. Peter Marshall, in Richard H. Brooks, Inherit the Wealth: Reflections on Living Well (Bloomington, IN: 1st Book Library, 2003), 127.