Good Advice
You can find good advice almost everywhere. You can find bad advice almost everywhere. And…
You can find situations that good advice becomes bad advice and situations where bad advice becomes good advice.
If that seems a bunch of gobble-de- gook, it can be that as well. A few months ago I was congratulated by someone I didn’t give advice to because I didn’t give them advice against marrying the person they wanted to marry.
I did feel grateful that they felt grateful, but I had a nagging question. Will they still feel that way if it goes sideways? Like a young man wrote oodles of years ago when he was looking at his picture in his high school yearbook when he said, “Look at how long my hair was, and no one warned me I would look back at this picture thinking how dumb I looked.”
Someone may have reminded the boy with the graduation picture/long hair that he had been warned, but… So, I was feeling accomplished, not because I didn’t agree with some of the naysayers, or could have agreed with them. I felt accomplished because after seven kids I absolutely knew that nothing I said would make a difference.
And the second thing I know is even if the odds of naysayers and/ or me being right were on one side, only God knows how things will really turn out. How many times do old people witness that—Everyone told us it wouldn’t work, but here we are fifty years later.
And there we must leave it in the end, at the foot of the throne.
Philippians 1:
20 According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death.
21 For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.
22 But if I live in the flesh, this is the fruit of my labour: yet what I shall choose I wot not.
23 For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better:
24 Nevertheless to abide in the flesh is more needful for you.
25 And having this confidence, I know that I shall abide and continue with you all for your furtherance and joy of faith;
26 That your rejoicing may be more abundant in Jesus Christ for me by my coming to you again.
27 Only let your conversation be as it becometh the gospel of Christ: that whether I come and see you, or else be absent, I may hear of your affairs, that ye stand fast in one spirit, with one mind striving together for the faith of the gospel;
28 And in nothing terrified by your adversaries: which is to them an evident token of perdition, but to you of salvation, and that of God.
29 For unto you it is given in the behalf of Christ, not only to believe on him, but also to suffer for his sake;
30 Having the same conflict which ye saw in me, and now hear to be in me.