During my quiet time last night I was talking to God about some stuff going on with me and asking for His help, support and guidance and then I thought to myself, my prayers lately seem to focus on what’s wrong and my
asking God to fix the bad stuff, I’m not spending nearly enough time thanking God for the good stuff in my life. This morning I thought about what a great student small group lesson this will make. I love when God uses these times to put a lesson plan in my mind!
This morning I was thinking about this and I thought about this line from the movie, “Apollo 13”. The scene is in a conference room and all of the technicians and engineers are telling Gene Krantz, the flight director for Apollo 13 about all that is wrong with the space craft. His question back to them is awesome, here’s the line:
“Let’s look at this thing from a… um, from a standpoint of status. What do we have on the spacecraft that’s good?”
He didn’t focus on what was wrong; he focused on what was good! Once he did that the answer to getting the Apollo 13 astronauts back to Earth became obvious, use the Lunar Module as a lifeboat for them.
Lately I’ve spent too much time focused on what’s not going good in my life and not enough time on what’s going good. God wants our problems; he wants us to ask for His help.
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone?” Matthew 7:7-9–ESV
But we also need to thank God for all that we do have. There are people who would feel blessed to have our problems! The issue is for us to remember this when times are going bad. When life gets hard, pray harder! We need to reach out to those close to us and ask for help and prayer. We also need to teach students that God uses our problems and troubles to grow and stretch us as Christians. If we focus on the good stuff, the bad stuff seems smaller and it’s easier to see God’s answers.
