It’s Not Always A Rose Garden

There was a country song out many years ago called “I Never Promised You A Rose Garden”–in other words, I never told you life would be always easy.  Right now my wife and I are experiencing a “not-rose garden”.  We live in a condo and early Sunday morning the water heater in the apartment above us broke and water came down through our walls into our bathroom and kitchen.  Now the drywall has to be replaced and the bathroom redone.  We will have to leave our home for about 10 days to 2 weeks while the work is done.  The damage isn’t too awful and the repairs won’t cost us anything, but our lives are still being disrupted and made less than pleasant.

That’s the way life is in this sin saturated world we live in. Nothing is perfect, everything is distorted by sin and all manner of bad can happen to anyone–even saved saints of God.  Now some people try to tell us that if we just have true faith nothing bad will ever happen to us, we’ll all be healthy, wealthy and wise, to quote Benjamin Franklin.  There is a whole segment of the Christian Church that teaches what is sometimes called a prosperity gospel, which is indeed no Gospel at all but a bunch of malarkey thought up by people who are generally the only ones who seem to become wealthy.

Christians are not immune to the ills of this world.  What we are is forgiven and rescued from our sinfulness by the blood of Jesus, and that is worth far, far more than anything this world can give us.  Our future is assured because Christ did for us what neither we nor anything in this world could do.  That is what we hold to in times of difficulty.

But still–I can’t wait to get my place back in order.   🙂