Good

 Consensus states that something is only worth as much as someone else is willing to pay for it. If I’m trying to get a hundred bucks for a half-eaten Twinkie, even if in the right light the leftover half looks like Elvis, chances are no one is going to shell out that kind of money. If, however, I’m trying to sell a car for a dollar, people will be lining up around the block.

Some things have inherent value, like an ounce of gold or a bar of silver, at least for now, while legal tender is still something people are willing to trade for their time and energy. You can’t eat gold or silver, but in most instances, you can get a decent meal in exchange. This is viable only insofar as food is plentiful, available, and readily obtained. However, once people start running low and it becomes harder to find, exchanging it for gold becomes less and less appealing.

Between a quarter of a kab of dove’s dung costing upwards of five pieces of silver or that there was a market for dove’s dung, I don’t know which is more eye-opening, but famine has a way of making you less picky about the things you eat or what you’re willing to call food.

In case you think that the dove dung merchants were price gouging, a quarter of a kab is close to half a quart, so five pieces of silver is still reasonable, even if bordering on excessive. Why they didn’t eat the doves that were producing the dung is a puzzle I’ve yet to solve, but maybe they decided they’d rather have the long-term supply of dung than the one-time meal. That said, what were the doves eating? If you have no clue what I’m going on about, you should read your Bible more.

The point is that the same people who were shelling out five pieces of silver for a half quart of dove dung likely scraped it off the bottom of their sandals when times were good and food was plentiful. It never crossed their minds that the stuff they were trying to clean off their soles would someday be deemed the best thing they’d ever eaten.

By the by, hunger does that to you. It makes average meals seem like feasts and bland-tasting ordinary things as though a renowned chef crafted them. If my girls happen to miss lunch for whatever reason, come dinnertime, those butter noodles with parmesan cheese they roll their eyes at under normal circumstances seem like a delicacy. Cut up a hot dog and mix it in, and you’re a shoo-in for dad of the year.

The difference in how you perceive something as being good, good for you, or not, is often just a matter of time. Time will shift your perception and allow you to see more clearly what you once saw, only in shadows.

When James tells us that every good and perfect gift is from above, it isn’t you or I who determine what good and perfect are; it is God. God defines what is good. God defines what is perfect. It may be difficult for us to see some things in our lives as good or perfect, but we trust that God sees beyond the horizon and knows that they are. We do not have the luxury of future time; we cannot see beyond today, or beyond the next handful of minutes for that matter, but we know He does, and this is why we are not dismayed, swayed, or easily shaken.

I may not see the good in a situation I am going through presently, but I know that one day, I will look back on it and see the plan of God, why what happened had to happen, and even the manner in which it occurred.

As temporal creatures here for a breath, it’s hard to wrap our minds around something taking a decade or two to work itself out, but God is eternal, and He sees your end from the beginning with all the major and minor turning points along the way.

God is not constrained by my five-year plan. He doesn’t have to do anything He doesn’t want to do, nor does He have to do what He wants to do within the timeframe I insist He does it in. Whether I see something as good or perfect does not take away from the reality that it is because every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.

It’s not just that we want what we want; we want it the way we want it, and any variation from our expectation is perceived as God having fallen short. It’s because we’ve forgotten who He is and who we are in relation to Him that we have the temerity to shake our finger at Him and make demands.

We think we know better, so we are unwilling to acknowledge that being left to the desire of our heart or being given everything we’ve ever wanted is the worst possible outcome for us. We like to think we have it all figured out and that we wouldn’t crater our lives until there was nothing left but a sack full of regrets and more emotional scars than there is soul. The truth is painful to acknowledge, but it is nevertheless the truth: save for the light of Christ in our lives, we’re all one trip into the fields away from braining our sibling with a rock just because we think they got the better genes.

With love in Christ,

Michael Boldea, Jr.