God's Abundance...

These past few days I have been having some great email conversations with the ever beautiful & intelligent, Leanne Wadman. With her permission, I want to share with you some of her thoughts.

The conversation has been on how God uses various experiences (particularly painful ones) to bring about growth and life to our souls. Here is what Leanne shared with me:

Psalm 66.8-12
Let the whole world bless our God and sing aloud his praises.
Our lives are in his hands, and he keeps our feet from stumbling.
You have tested us, O God; you have purified us like silver melted in a crucible.
You captured us in your net and laid the burden of slavery on our backs.
You sent troops to ride across our broken bodies. We went through fire and flood.
But you brought us to a place of great abundance.

Psalms 71.20
Though you have made me see troubles, many & bitter, you will restore my life
again. From the depths of the earth you will again bring me up.

"...it reminded me that it was good and right to praise God in my pain and that he did hear me – even if I felt far from him. he had brought me through so much in the past and I knew he’d bring me back to my place of abundance again – even if that place isn’t the same as the place I left or how I remembered his abundance to be. God’s abundance is good no matter what it looks like."

Leanne's thought that, "God's abundance is good no matter what it looks like." has stuck with me ever since I first read it. I'm still chewing on it right now as I type these words. Sometimes God's abundance comes packaged much differently than what we expected it. It came to us via a totally unexpected route and delivered to us by the last person we could imagine bringing us such a parcel. If that is not enough, sometimes even when we open up the package that contains God's abundance, we are then even more surprise that the abuncance itself is very much different than what we had in mind. Neverheless, isn't it true that "God's abundance is good no matter what it looks like."?

Give me your thoughts on this.