The Great Goodness

The Great Goodness

How great is the goodness you have stored up for those who fear you. You lavish it on those who come to you for protection, blessing them before the watching world. Psalm 31:19

In college, I bent to the peer pressure of my friends. I wanted to be liked and to be like everyone else.

Day in and day out, it was the same routine. We went to class and then went out drinking. Down the Hatch was the name of our favorite bar—and it was aptly named. When we were through, if we had any time left, we’d grab a little sleep before heading off to class again. In medical school, I more or less kept up the same routine. Classes, drinks, and a few hours of shut-eye.

Then I met Karen and asked her out. When she saw the routines of my life and learned that I was an atheist, she questioned the trajectory I was on. One day, she gave me a copy of C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity and asked me to read it.

I read the book while camping, and it made a tremendous impression on me. As a young man, Lewis had wrestled with many of the same issues I had, including questions about God. Eventually, he came to realize that God truly was, is, and forever will be.

That night, through a dream, my transformation from being an atheist to a believer occurred instantly. I was thrown off my high horse, and my eyes were opened to the new person that God wanted me to become.

Your transformation may have been more gradual, but the end result is the same. God renews our minds as he makes us into new creatures. The way we think about this world changes as we realize how temporary it is. As today’s verse says, God has stored up goodness for us, and he will lavish it upon us when we fear him and come to him for protection. I felt his goodness that day—and have every day since.

Since college, my routines have certainly changed, but the biggest change is this: I used to run from God, but now I run to him.

TODAY’S RX

If you’re dissatisfied in this world, perhaps it’s because you were created for another world, as C. S. Lewis suggests. Today, reflect on the goodness of God that awaits us in heaven.

Lord, as I look back on my past, I see how you have faithfully been working in my life, molding me day-by-day into the person you desire me to be. Continue to renew my mind, Lord, as I live out each day so that I may see with brighter clarity the treasure that awaits me.