Sometimes small pain is to avoid bigger pain

I’ve always said sometimes we learn our lesson through a small painful situation to avoid a much larger painful situation.  This makes me happy for the small lessons.  

Let me give you an example:  you hire a contractor for a very small job, knowing you may hire him for a very large job.  He takes the down payment for the small job and skips town.  In this situation, I would say, “Hey, at least we learned our lesson before losing a large amount of money!”

Another example:  Last summer my son fell backwards off of a four wheeler.  He did a back flip off of it from a sitting position.  He was fine after a few mommy and daddy hugs.  I said, “Wow, we really learned our lesson on that one!”  I was so thankful everything happened the way it did, because we took extra precautions from then on to avoid a larger catastrophe.

So you see, you really can thank God for some painful situations and mean it.  Sometimes, it’s hard to put two and two together to come up with something positive, but really, there are times when there is no other way to look at it.  Meaning, in order to make sense of something you may have to realize you just learned a very valuable lesson.  You may never know what the BIG thing was that you avoided since you learned the smaller lesson, but really…….THAT’S OK!

Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus.

1 Thessalonians 5:18

Dear Lord, thank you so much for giving me small lessons to avoid bigger pain.  Please, help me to recognize these lessons and learn.