Our Heavenly Father can fix what's broken
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I have a 4-year-old daughter who has an amazing imagination.
One day I sent her to timeout. My children sit in timeout in the corner between the door to our garage and the coat closet in our house. Her few minutes were up, so I went to go get her when I heard her voice whispering. I paused to listen.
"OK, are you ready to marry your husband? You're going to have a very happy life with the closet door knob. OK, here's your flowers."
She had made pretend friends out of the doorknobs to the two doors, and was presenting a leaf she found on the floor as a bridal bouquet. I didn't even know how to respond to her indomitable imagination. I just asked her if I could officiate the wedding. My closet and garage door knobs have been happily married for several months now.
But sometimes her imagination is tragically limited. If she breaks a toy, it's the end of her world and she can't imagine things ever getting better, much less the toy being fixed. That's when I ask her, "What do daddies do?" We fix things.
I see the same lack of imagination when I counsel with people. They cannot imagine this situation improving or that relationship ever working. They cannot imagine a world in which their Heavenly Father fixes things, and so they never trust him to do it.
As you read this, you are either in the middle of some kind of bad day or you've got one coming. That's the nature of living in a broken and fallen world.
The best example of this I can think of is Joseph, the favorite son of his father Jacob. He did less work than his older brothers and his father gave him exceptionally nice clothes. Life was good. Then the bad days came when his resentful brothers sold him into slavery. Then good days came again when Joseph's new master gave him more and more responsibility, and even though it was still slavery, he was able to live comfortably. Then the bad days came again when his master's wife falsely accused him of rape. This was the continual pattern of Joseph's life until he eventually rose to the position of second-in-command over the whole nation of Egypt and successfully saved Egypt from what would otherwise be a devastating famine. At the end of Genesis, Joseph got a chance to confront his brothers. They were terrified that he would take revenge on them after Jacob died, but Joseph insisted he wouldn't. Instead, he said, "You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives" (Genesis 50:20).
Not only does Joseph claim that God was powerful enough to redeem the harm his brothers intended to cause him. He claims God intended to do so from the very beginning — even allowing it to happen when he could otherwise stop it — in order to save lives. God didn't just fix it. He made the world a better place through Joseph's suffering.
I'm pretty sure it takes some imagination to think that way. Except, contrary to the other ways we use our imaginations wherein the imagined things do not exist or have yet to exist, this is a fact that is already at work. God's sovereign control relentlessly manipulates choices that are out of his control and circumstances that he completely controls in order to continue his ongoing redemption of this world. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted Theodore Parker, the founder of American Unitarianism, when he said, "The arch of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." We know this is true because Joseph claims it's God who bends it.
When the bad days come, are you able to imagine that God will use the circumstance for something good? Try to fathom a God so powerful he can take the worst humanity and Satan have to offer and create something good from it. He promised to "make all things new" (Revelation 21:5).
As my daughter gets older, she is learning to trust that "daddies fix things." When things break, she doesn't cry so much. I try with all my might to be faithful in that role because I know that if I do, and Leah learns to trust her earthly father with her broken things, she may more easily trust her Heavenly Father with the same broken things. I pray the same for each of us.