No Need to "What if?" .................. Parables 007

A bus full of high school students saw what looked like a human hand lying on the street as they were going to school today.
 
Another school was closed this afternoon due to a bomb threat.
 
News headlines tell of schools attacked by snipers, burned down by pranksters, bullet-sprayed by crazies, taught by sexually perverted people, marched on by mad minorities, and crashed into by airplanes.
 
Who said, “Enjoy school -- it is the best time of your life”?
 
Moms and dads reading these things are beginning to “what-if?” Some have pulled their children out of school and retreated underground, to spend the rest of their lives “protected” from society in a bomb shelter. Others worry themselves gray. Still others try to shut it out, knowing they have little control.
 
One of these unusual events touched my life this week. As my son told me about it, this thought ran through my mind, “But we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose.”
 
I wondered, for a brief moment, why that verse from Romans 8 should fit this situation. But later on I realized how practical it was. The “news of the day” had not flustered me in the slightest. That truth protected me from the “what-if’s.”
 
I send my son to school about 200 days out of a year, and run the risk of a multitude of things that could happen to him. Yet over and over again, this promise from God sets my mind at rest. I know that it applies to me, for I love God and have been called by Him according to His purpose. But it also applies to my son. He loves God also, and has responded to His call. And, according to the Word of God, nothing is going to happen to him that God cannot use in his life, for God’s own good purpose. The very next verse (verse 29) reveals that His purpose is to transform those He calls into the image of His Son, Jesus Christ.
 
Frankly, I haven’t a clue how God controls the events of life, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, and uses them to mold a person into a different person’s image. I do know that he starts from within, and gives the gift of his Son to each of us who have responded to His call. His Son lives within. Then somehow, He takes the outside and reworks it to match the inside. That makes all of life a school -- a school where every situation is a lesson or an exam, and the only way to fail is to refuse to be molded.
 
We will send our son back to school, confident of Who is in charge of his life, and joyfully see both kinds of school shaping him to mental and spiritual maturity. And we don’t have to “what-if.”