There’s a phrase I used to say that I’ve stopped saying. It would go something like this:
(Random person, friend, family member, etc): “How have things been going, Hunter?”
Me: “Really good! God has been so good to me lately.”
Seems innocuous, doesn’t it?
Here’s the problem that I realized: whether or not I feel like God’s been good to me, God is always good. To me. To you. To everyone. Good is who God is (and He’s so much more… but at minimum, He’s good).
After years of saying, “God’s been so good to me lately,” I got convicted: who am I to say whether God’s been good? I realized that—based on my own perceptions of the way my life was going—I had given myself the right to define what God was… or wasn’t.
I realized a problem with this logic when I started thinking about the opposite. If I was saying that God has been really good lately because I got a raise and the weather has been pleasant and I’m making new friendships, then does that make God evil when money is tight and the weather and life are stormy and I feel all alone?
No! Whether I feel it or not, whether I think that I’m benefitting from God’s goodness, God is good. Point blank. My own perceptions of God don’t change who God is.
When I tell others whether God is good, it makes me the authority, not God. That makes me god, taking from God what is rightfully His: the ability to define what is good.
This conviction also made me aware that my understanding of what it means to be good is so limited. After all, I would only say that God has been good when life was going well for me. When I had all my needs and most of my wants met. When I felt in control.
But what about the times when life isn’t going well for me? When I’m not getting what I want and even lack some of what I need? When life feels out of control? Has God stopped being good to me then?
Or, is God even more good to me in those times? I think He is. In one of my favorite psalms, Psalm 34, David says this:
“The Lord is close to the brokenhearted
Psalm 34:18
and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
Which is more good: for someone to help you out of a tough situation or for them to enter into the tough situation and be with you through it? *cue a “Footprints in the Sand” reference*
I think that our greatest need in times of trouble isn’t to be pulled out of the trouble, but to know we’re not alone in the trouble.
Isn’t this the story of Job? It may have been a while since you’ve read that long (and pretty confusing) book of the Bible. But in essence, Job and the people around him wrestle with this question: Can God be both good and Job not experience life as good?
Job’s wife suggests that God should be cursed, that maybe He isn’t good.
Job’s friends suggest that Job must have done something wrong and should repent.
Job, on the other hand, knows that he’s blameless and that God is good. So, amidst he laments to and about God, he requests an audience with God to help him make sense of it all.
Strangely enough, God doesn’t make sense of it for Job. Instead, God just shows up. And that is enough for Job.
What would it look like to realize that—no matter what life throws at me—God is good? Whether I feel like everything is good or everything is bad or something in between, that God hasn’t changed? What would it look like to know that God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is always present to me—in the good and bad times of life?
And what would it look like to know that God is present, by the power of the Holy Spirit? That God’s presence is enough? And that God’s presence is evidence of His goodness?
Maybe we’d respond, in all times and in all seasons:
I may be good. I may be bad. Life my be joyful. Life may be dreadful.
But God is good.
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Hunter Bethea 
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