Sometimes there is a reason, but I will never know what it is. I was visiting with my good friends and neighbors last week, on my way out to pick up pig and chicken feed. After a good chat. I headed out to my truck when I saw this, my driver's side window was shattered. We racked our brains but couldn't figure out how it had happened. No one was mowing, the kids were all talking with us (they are raising a baby coon and they had it out to show me), the window wasn't facing the road, yet there it was, a spiderweb of broken safety glass. I called Mike and explained what had happened, and asked could I drive the truck home to clean up the window. He told me to sit tight and then called me back to say, no, the glass would just fall out if I tried. He was right, the moment I began to mess with the window, tiny bits of glass began to shower down and I could hear the whole window shifting.
I walked home filled a bucket with painter's tape, garbage bag, and heavy gloves and walked back over to the neighbor's farm. With their daughter Jennifer's help, I taped a bag inside the door, spread a junk sheet over the interior and while she held the bag up I carefully pushed the broken window bits into the bag.
It was the first in a string of truly aggravating things that happened that day. Why? I don't know but it was that bad day that brought me to meditate on James 1:2-4 "Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything."
The whole text is challenging, especially the part about being mature and complete. The trouble with me is that I want to be mature and complete before I run into trouble. Because when I run into problems (or trials of many kinds) I tend to get really whiny, I feel persecuted and frustrated, in short I act like a toddler, and if I don't act like one I often feel like one. (You can see how the mature and complete thing would be appealing)
Yet it is the trial and the perseverance that will make me into the person I desire to be, not the absence of difficulty or a permanently cool temperament. I may never know why any of the cruddy things that happened that day happened but I am trying to pay attention to my attitude. I am trying to make a change from feeling afflicted to being thankful for the opportunity to grow in perseverance, to mature, and know that good things grow from hard things.
(if you enjoy irony, I finished typing this post and was trying to adjust formatting and the first paragraph got stuck with huge line spaces that I cannot figure out how to get rid of, why? I have no idea, but rather than curse my computer I am leaving it that way for two reasons 1) I don't know how to fix it ( I have tried about 15 different ways) 2) It speaks eloquently to my soul about how I need to move beyond to intellectual comprehension to belief, do I believe "trials of many kind" will help me grow and mature? or am I just saying that...)