Your soul's health

I thought it was about time I posted something with a little more substance than I have been of late. But I haven't had a good week. It's had one of those moments of realisation in it when you discover that you really are just the stupid ass, who actually thought that this time you might get the dangling carrot, but that it's as out of reach as ever. And so I dug another grave in the graveyard of buried hopes (to steal a melodramatic phrase from Anne of Green Gables) and faced the void of disappointment.

But sometimes we receive simple prompts from strange places and during the week I received an email from Sweden, which quoted from Phillip Yancey's book "Prayer". I am not an indiscriminate Yancey fan, though have certainly benefitted from some of his writing, and this is what was in the email:

In all my prayers, whether I get the answers I want or not, I can count on this one fact: God can make use of whatever happens. Nothing is irredeemable. "Teach me, O God, so to use all the circumstances of my life today that they may bring forth in me the fruits of holiness rather than the fruits of sin," prayed the British author John Baille: Let me use disappointment as material for patience, success as material for thankfulness, trouble as material for perseverence, danger as material for courage, reproach as material for long suffering, praise as material for humility, pleasures as material for temperance, pain as material for endurance. Pp 239-240

It reminded me of something I read recently, but can't remember the source, which said that "nothing can happen to you that is bad for your soul's health" - if only we can so turn it around.