When times are good be happy

I had just finished teaching "An invitation to a storm"a study on Mark 4: 35-41 when she came up to talk to me. She told me about the happy place she was in life. She and her husband were doing well she had just given birth to her second child and her family was experiencing a deep since of peace and harmony the verse that came to me was "When times are good be happy;but when times are bad , consider;God made the one as well as the other." Ecclesiastes 7:14

I understood why she came up to me I know the feeling I have often had when things seemed to be going well. In my mind the verse could be written,"When things are good you better enjoy it because you know it's not going to last." This since of foreboding definitely detracts from from my ability to experience joy.

Circumstances change but God remains the same. When I read the Bible I am keenly aware of an invitation to know who God is. When I read about how God took His children into the wilderness before taking them into the Promise Land I see God wanting to teach them to trust Him. I remember The first time I saw that God wanted them to "enter into His rest" but they would not. I began to ask to let me enter into His rest. I didn't realize that I was asking for a trip into the wilderness.

How does the wilderness become a place to learn to trust God and enter into His rest? I have found the answer in Deuteronomy 32:10,11 " In the desert land he found him, in a barren and howling waste. He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye, like an eagle that stirs up its nest and hovers over its young, that spreads its wings to catch them and carries them on its pinions."I see this in God's leading the Children of  Israel through the wilderness and I find it true in my own "wilderness".

Because of our relationship with a loving God we can rest secure in good times and in bad because He remains the same and He loves us. "Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long, and the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders." Deuteronomy 33:12