First Day of Blog

Well, here it goes. I have tried the blog thing before, but to little avail. I am going at it for real this time. I want to keep up with this every night. There are a lot of reasons, but I don't think that I need to post them on the internet for the world to see.
Tonight I can't help but think about Paul and his thorn. That was really obnoxious that God would not let him free of it. Sometimes I don't understand our lack of progress and God's aparent refusal to give us a hand. Paul had something that was nagging him and his ministry, and he asked for it to be gone. God said, "Nope." I can think of a million things in my own life that I feel like hold me back. When I expand that to the church in general, I can see another million things that I continually pray that God will help us fix. He could fix so many things with just a wave of his hand. Does he enjoy seeing us struggle?
Well, I don't think so. I think that he actually hates seeing us struggle, but we still do for three reasons. First of all, a lot of things we take out of our hands by not doing what we need to do to let him work. We quench the Spirit. Secondly, we learn from the struggles. We become better, and he knows that some things we are dumb enough to have to learn on our own. Finally, it seems that in general we have to get used to the fact he is God. Sometimes he recieves glory in our weakness. It seems like that is what he told Paul. "My strength is made perfect in weakness." Like the poor blind man in John, often I think that we struggle so that God might be glorified. I don't know what that means, and I don't like it, but I submit to God because he is God. I guess that I just have to get used to it.
I know this doesn't sound too optimistic, but the fact is that we give false hope if we say that things will certainly work out. They don't always. We have to get used to our God. He is not a tame lion. He is good, but he is not safe. That takes a lot of time, but we have no other choice. Christ may look at us in the hard times and say "Will you forsake me too?" I answer with Peter, "Lord, to whom else can we go?"