I was thinking this morning about how God can take the most random things and work them for our good. Things that we might view as upsetting or frustrating and He tuns them around in the most unexpected ways. I have a really good example of this that happened just recently.
A few months ago, the body lotion that I have been buying for years, was discontinued. I was flabbergasted and kind of affronted. How could they do this to me? Did these people have any idea just how hard it is to find a decent lotion that is fragrance free and didn’t contain anything that I am allergic to?! Especially since I can’t SMELL anything most of the time, so it’s not like I can do my own sniff check on it or anything.
I spent weeks after that stalking various stores, trying to find somebody, anybody, that still had some bottles left. With absolutely no luck. With my lotion bottles running near empty, we began (or continued really) the search for a new lotion. We, my daughter and I, searched the local stores, but came up empty. The search continued on Amazon. Scrolling through a seemingly never ending list, looking for something, anything, that would work. Even if it was something that would only just tide us over for awhile until we found a better option.
Finally we found one option. One kind of lotion that was fragrance free, didn’t contain anything that we could see that I was allergic to, and didn’t have a huge long list of chemicals in it. And thankfully, it was also reasonably priced. So, I ordered some up.
A few days later, the lotion arrived. We quickly found that while it was fragrance free, it wasn’t unscented. (By ‘we’ of course here, I mean my daughter. To this day I still can’t smell the stuff.) This gave us some immediate concern into the viability of using this lotion. But, a few days pasts and everybody seemed to be ok. I didn’t start having any noticeable symptoms. No one else started having increased issues either. So, after breathing a sigh of relief and a prayer of thanksgiving, we went along our merry little way. For the most part anyway. We didn’t super love the new lotion. It seems like you put it on and five minutes later your skin has just sucked that stuff straight in, making you feel like you have to throw on a fresh coat every few hours. But since everybody seemed otherwise ok, we decided to wait and see.
We were probably a couple of months in when I began to notice something. By this point, we were looking Christmas in the face and winter was upon us. Usually, by this point in the season, my fingertips are wearing a variety of bandaid style bandages on any given day. For whatever reason, years ago, my fingers would start splitting at the tips of my fingernails in the winter time. They would just split. And then they would hurt. If I ignored it, the splitting would just get longer and deeper and hurt even more. It didn’t matter how much lotion or moisturizer that I would use, nothing would stop this process from starting as soon as the weather turned to winter and it would continue all the way through until at least spring arrived. On any given day during winter I would have anywhere between two and four bandages on as many fingers, with triple antibiotic, because that ws the only way I found to get these splits to heal. And even that was only ever temporarily. Lasting at most, a few days, until those fingers split again. Typically speaking, by Christmas, I might have already gone through 25-50 bandages. This Christmas I realized that I had gone through one. Just one.
But, you know, it hadn’t been super cold, so I thought, huh, maybe it’s just a fluke. I will give it a little more time to kind of wait and see what happens. A few more weeks passed. The temperature got colder and did it’s usual up and down thing as it does. And I watched. I waited. Three weeks passed. It is now the middle of January. Guess how many bandages I’ve needed to use since I noticed before Christmas? Zero. That’s right. Not a single bandage. Not a single split.
Here I went from being frustrated at the situation, not understanding why yet another obstacle had to come up. Irritated at having to to all of the effort to find a new kind of lotion to use. Having to spend hours, lots of them, painstakingly going through all of these different kinds of lotion. For what felt like, no good reason. Only to find out on the other side, that the lotion that I had been using, the lotion that got discontinued, had only been feeding this problem. And God cared enough to send this obstacle into my path, to lead me to a healthier option for me. Here He was, running intervention for a problem that I didn’t even realize existed. Talk about your silver lining in a seemingly bad situation. Here I was complaining and really God was working all the things for my good. How often do we hear the verse in Romans,
“And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.”
-Romans 8:28 NASB1995
We may not always know how God is working the situations in our life for good. We may not always feel confident in how He even could possibly use some of the things in our lives for good. But somehow, whether we see how He is working or not, He continues to move through the bad situations as well as the good, bringing things together for us and for His glory. I love the times when I am able to stop for a moment as just see where He has taken a negative situation and directly used it for my good and for His glory. I’m feeling so thankful for His love for me today.
In case you were wondering, the lotion that I switched to is Palmer’s Cocoa Butter Formula FragranceFree
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