A week after we found out that Brendan’s police report would take 6-8 weeks, which would be 1-3 weeks past our planned wedding, Brendan decided to call and check on the progress anyway. Turns out, a clerical error had caused his paperwork to be misplaced. Could things get worse? Initially, it didn’t seem like it. But the bad circumstances ended up being great because the clerk was so apologetic about messing up that he put a rush on it, and Brendan was able to pick up the report just a few days later. What had seemed like the worst situation possible, actually made way for the impossible to happen!

Perhaps you’ve seen or heard of any number of renditions of the “That’s Good, That’s Bad” skit in which two characters dialogue about something bad that happens which turns out to be good, but leads to something that seems bad, and so the script continues on and on comically until it ends with something unexpectedly good.

This felt like one of those situations, and if we hadn’t been so serious in our pursuits, we might have laughed over it. As it was, we were stunned and excited.

It’s that way with God. Everything that starts out bad turns out being good–usually in ways that we would never imagine or expect and sometimes even humorously. We don’t see the whole big picture, and we can never tell what God is doing behind the scenes. That’s bad you might say because we worry about things, fear things and get upset about things when we don’t know what will happen. But really, that’s good because if God sees the bigger picture that we can’t, he’s also able to do things we would not think about. And because he’s God, he can make things happen to work out for us…like misplaced papers.

There’s a verse in the Bible that says that God makes everything work out for our good and so people will know he’s God, when we love him and trust him to. Boy, did we have opportunities to practice that! And that seems bad, but really it was good!