Tests

In school when we spent our days learning in class we would look forward,most times with dread,to taking test.
Now test are very important they prove to not only our teacher,but our selves how much we have mastered from what was taught and where we needed to go back and restudy.
I have always been a test worrier.
In Nursing School I would cram so much information into my brain,about multiple subjects,so I could pass my many test.
10 months,7 days a week, my life was spent in constant reading and studying just so I could pass the next mornings up and coming tests.
I can remember some Sundays coming home from work,going out to supper then studying until midnight.Getting up at 5am the next morning to study more until it was time to leave for school.
Just getting by was not going to happen with me.I needed A's and B's to make me feel I had achieved my goal.
We are always tested by God and the thing with him is if we fail we are retested until we get it right.
Have you ever had times in your life where it just seems like everyday brings a new problem?
You just can not believe how truly bad things around you can get then it gets worse?
Day after day,week after week maybe even month after month.
I can remember a song from the show Hee Haw that went "if it weren't for bad luck I'd have no luck at all."
Well believe it or not these are God test and your job is to show him you can pass them by having the right spiritual attitude and turning to him.
When my mother was dying of Colon Cancer I bought a key ring which said "the Lord is my Shepard and I shall not want."
I carried this in my pocket everyday,every where I went and every time I felt I could not go on any more,I would rub this key ring and repeat the words over and over in my mind until I believed them.
This saying helped me through my mothers death,my fathers stroke and his passing,my son being sent to Iraq,multiple family members sicknesses and deaths,and the cleaning and selling of my parents house, and my childhood home.
Stress and pressure that I could not even understand that was being placed on my shoulders until one day at a church in Webster Mass.I happened to look up at an icon of Jesus crucified on the cross and truly understood what it felt like to be alone and abandoned by everyone but the Father.
I think I passed the test.
All the situations I had been placed into showed me that in the end it was just me and God.
Test are given to us all the time but we just don't understand them.
We think its just bad luck,its not.
I always think of the saying the metal tried in the fire becomes the strongest.
God wants people of strength and character.He wants the truest,strongest,purest metal he can get to do his work.
Weak Christians make for a weak world with zero character.
Don't be afraid of trials. They are what make you strong and gives God something he can count on in this world of instability and ever changing emotions.