All things are not good.
Sunday, August 2, 2009 at 10:22AM Aren't you a bit tweaked whenever a well-meaning friend attempts to shape your thinking by quoting, "All things work together for good..."? But wait a minute. I'm hurting here, and you've just avoided my pain by quoting Scripture at me.
Thankfully, a friend of mine didn't do that the other day. He shared with me a perspective of author Dallas Willard on this passage: Just because all things work together for good, does not imply that all those things are good things. Some of them might be down right nasty, and it's not helpful to sugercoat them. However, just as you wouldn't want to eat the raw eggs or the flower by themselves while mixing up the ingredients to a cake, you can be assured that the final outcome will be worked into a whole that supercedes the sum of its ingredients. You do want the cake... as a whole.
I think this framework does justice to our pain, while acknowledging God's redemptive and creative hand.