Everything Is Against Me!

Oh, what a limited view we have of what God is doing in our lives.  "All these things are against me," cried Jacob in Genesis 42:36.  "What was against him?" you might ask.  Well, Jacob had been living under the belief that his second youngest son--his pride and joy, Joseph, had been killed by some vicious animal.  Now, he and his family were in the middle of a famine, and they were having trouble putting food on the table.  So he sent his sons to a foreign country to see if they could buy some food.  But when they got there, one of Jacob's sons, Simeon, was arrested and put into jail on charges of being a spy.  And the only way that Simeon was going to be released from jail was if his family could prove that he was not lying about having a younger brother.  As such, when Jacob's sons got home and told him about all that had happened and that they would not allow Jacob's family to buy food anymore until they proved that Simeon had a younger brother, Jacob was distraught and cried out: "All these things are against me."  But were they really?  In reality, God was about to bless Jacob's socks off.  For Jacob's son (the one he thought had been killed by an animal) actually had been elevated by God to second in charge in that entire country.  He wasn't dead; rather, he was alive, well, powerful, and prospering.  And now God was going to uncover Jacob's eyes and reveal what He had been doing for the past few years.  So learn the lesson that I am sure Jacob would have told you himself: stop whining like a baby when looking at your apparent circumstances.  Yes, it may look like everything is going against you, but God is at work, and He will reveal, in His time, what He has been doing in your life.  Put simply, you know that He is good, so start living like it and quit the whining.