Job\u2019s freedom to choose God also, of course, gave him the ability to reject Him. C.S Lewis explains why God gives us this kind of choice. \u201cIf a thing is free to be good, it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil to be possible. Why then did God give us free will? Because free will, although it makes evil possible, is also the one thing that makes possible any love or goodness worth having. Without free will, we would simply be like robots. <\/em><\/p>\nI have also been thinking that suffering allows us to appreciate how good the good times had been before we started suffering – especially things we had taken for granted like good health and being able to walk and run. It is not until we lose the ability to do something that we fully appreciate how good the thing was that has been lost.<\/p>\n
It was Jodie Mitchell in her song \u201cBig Yellow Taxi\u201d who wrote \u201cYou don\u2019t know what you\u2019ve got till it\u2019s gone.\u201d\u00a0 I am not suggesting that one has to suffer in order to appreciate the good things that have now passed, either temporarily or permanently but that we should make an effort to appreciate all the good things in life that we have and praise God for them. Furthermore I would suggest it is the simple things in life that are the best – things like friends and family rather than material goods- a new car is great fun but the novelty soon wears off and, in my experience it is better to be in the back garden with someone you love than in the Seychelles with someone you don\u2019t.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I Think of You Jesus – featuring Lucy Stimpson- Maynard from the album “Precious” recorded and produced by Ross Gill Before continuing with the series on suffering I would like to let you know that my dear friend Dr Graham Giles has just returned from the 64th President\u2019s Prayer Breakfast in Washington. He sat […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ken-shearsmiths-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":876,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/872\/revisions\/876"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/risen.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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