How Should We Respond to Unpleasant Things?

By Li Yan

One day, as I sat there flipping through the magazine, a small story caught my attention.

One day in 1914, a massive fire raged through inventor Edison’s lab complex, burning five city blocks and destroying almost his entire operation and his life’s work.

His wife broke down in tears in the face of damage, but Edison responded in a way that showed total control over his emotions. He thought disaster was also valuable, because he had just got rid of a lot of rubbish, and he could start all over again.

He immediately began rebuilding his laboratory the next morning, and three months later, he introduced the first phonograph in human history.

After reading this story, I sank into thought. A fire broke out, destroying Edison’s laboratory, and those precious research results. But this didn’t put him down; he just calmly said that all our mistakes were burned up. What’s more, this urged him to find answers to the problems that occurred in the previous experiments, and to keep making progress. As we can see, misfortunes are also meaningful, and it depends on how we respond to them.

However, people love comfort and dislike misfortunes. For this reason, people easily lose faith in God in adversity. In everyday life, we often pray to the Lord for success and prosperity in life, for money and status. Whenever the Lord doesn’t answer our prayers or allow misfortunes to happen, such as interests disputes, long illness or business failure, we then feel miserable and accuse God of not protecting us. “Why does God allow so much suffering? Is it that He doesn’t like us?” With our spirits sinking, we gradually fall into darkness, lose the normal relationship with the Lord, and even want to stray away from and betray Him.

In fact, when we come before the Lord, pray and seek His intention, we will find that our faith in the Lord is too lacking, and that we cannot withstand God’s test. When we are blessed with everything going well, we keep thanking the Lord, and swear to never leave the Lord; however, when we cannot see the Lord’s blessing, we then change our usual attitude, always complaining to God. Obviously, our faith in the Lord carries a tradeoff; Our faith is solely for the sake of winning blessings and grace. Our faith is nothing but talk, and it is not real. But the Lord’s purpose is always good: In order to train us and test us, He uses facts to enable us to see our true stature, let go of the wrong intentions and impurities, so that we will be able to obey the Lord, worship Him with an honest heart, no matter the environment is good or bad. At that time, we will pass the test.

Take Job as an example. He held fast to the way of fearing God and shunning evil in his entire life. Before he was 70 years old, he had great fortune, lived a rich material life, and he was the greatest of all men of the east. Afterward, because Satan wished to accuse Job, then suffering and refinements came to Job: He lost all his great wealth, all his children, and endured the utmost torment when his whole body was covered with sore boils. But he still praised the name of Jehovah God, and finally stood witness for God. In the end, he was able to see God’s back. What Job experienced was indeed miserable, but his faith in God was elevated during the trials. Just as he said after the suffering, “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear: but now my eye sees You” (Job 42:5). He couldn’t gain such things without the trials.

The Bible says, “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). We may have to endure the suffering when something not in line with our fleshly interests happens, but this can make up for our shortcomings, get our faith in the Lord purified, which will bring great benefit to our life growth. Therefore, when unpleasant things come, we should deal with them correctly, change our perspective, pray to God more, seek His intention more, and stand witness by relying on faith, and then we will get more precious things. At that time, we will find that adversity is more beneficial to our life than a comfortable environment, and it gives us a good opportunity to know the Lord and receive His approval.