Anna Rajan
Let me start off by quoting a friend of mine: An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered, and an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. When I first heard this, I was unable to listen to it. I asked her to repeat herself because I couldn’t grasp what she actually meant. Yet again, as our conversation continued, she reminded me that there is no such thing as right or wrong or good or evil, but that sometimes in life, what we are experiencing depends on our point of view. It may sometimes depend on our point of view whether we see anything as an opportunity or a crisis, an adventure or an inconvenience. It is all about our perspective.
In the 1400s, a group of people had this great idea to have a row of statues of Ancient Jewish figures from the Old Testament atop a church using the most expensive Carrera Marble. They hired a man named Agostino de Duccio to carve one of the characters. He began working on it and realised that, despite the fact that it was expensive, this block of marble was, too flawed to do anything with, and so he died about 12 years later. In Set 1476, Antonio Rosalino was assigned to work on the same marble that had too many flaws to ever be anything worthwhile. He replied yeah, I’ll take it no problem and he studied the stone and he started working on it and realised, this marble is too much, has too many flaws to ever be anything worthwhile and so he abandoned it as well. All they needed was they not only an artist, but someone to do this, who could look through and see what might be here.
So, quarter Century later after this, a hundred years after the idea basically of going to make these statues, they heard a 25-year-old sculptor and was Michelangelo and he set to work on this block of marble that many people had said was too flawed to ever be anything worthwhile. Three or four years later, he unveiled the statue David to the world. That’s actually in fact, it ended up being too magnificent, too big, too incredible to put on top of this church. So, they put it somewhere else and it’s widely known or regarded as the single most famous statue in in history. And it was a block of marble with too many flaws to ever be anything worthwhile. People ask David like, how did you do this, how did you see this, how did you create out of what people threw away? How did you create something so incredible? He said I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free. What others considered to be useless in, perspective changed everything.
God can use anything and God will use everything to bring about the good. That is the perspective of Daniel. That’s the perspective of Jeremiah. And, That’s the perspective of Jesus. Let me clarify it, The Sovereign will of God does not mean that God wants people to suffer to bring about the good.
C.S. Lewis says that pain is God’s megaphone to Rouse a deaf world. He says that we can ignore our pleasure, but pain insists on being attended to, and it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have to make Amendment. God Whispers to us in our Pleasures. He speaks to us in our conscience, but he shouts in our pains it is his megaphone to Rouse a deaf world. Pain removes the veil, plants the flag of Truth within the Fortress of the Rebel Soul, and wakes us up. This is why the Exile was not an accident, and why God allowed the people of Israel to be homeless so they would learn how-to live-in faith anywhere. Because God can use anything, God will use everything for our good and God is doing something, he’s present.
