Light still shines above the clouds

Isaiah 14:24 says, “‘Surely, just as I have intended so it has happened, and just as I have planned so it will stand.’ As God plans … so it stands. ‘Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord planned it?’ (Amos 3:6) … A good God plans everything. Everything. So a good God can only … make plans for good? He only give good gifts? A thing of evil can not be created by a good God? From a bedroom window, I watch a shadow move across the lawn, move across our wheat fields. That is what a shadow is, an empty space, a hole in the light. Evil is that — a hole in the goodness of God, a willful choice to turn away from the full goodness of God to that empty of His goodness…. All that God makes is good. Can it be that, that which seems to oppose the will of God actually is used of Him to accomplish the will of God? That which seems evil only seems so because of perspective, the way the eyes see the shadows. Above the clouds light never stops shining.

“I know all our days are struggle and warfare (Job 14:14) and that the spirit-to-spirit combat I endlessly wage with Satan is this ferocious thrash for joy. He sneers at all the things that seems to have gone hideously mad in this sin-drunk world, and I gasp to say that God is good. The liar defiantly scrawls his graffiti across God’s glory, and I heave to enjoy God…and Satan strangles, and I whiten knuckles to grasp real Truth and fix that beast to the floor.

“It’s just that the eyes are bad — my perspective. ‘Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body. When your eye is good, your whole body is filled with light. But when your eye is bad, your whole body is filled with darkness. And if the light you think you have is actually darkness, how deep that darkness is! If Satan can keep my eyes from the Word, my eyesight is too poor to read light — to fill with light. Without God’s word as a lens, my world warps.

“It’s the Word of God that fills our emptiness with the true and real and good, that makes the eyes see, the body full of light.”

— Ann VosKamp, One Thousand Gifts, (Excerpts p. 90-91)