All Things Work Together For Good
By Eric Butterworth – posted August 2, 2009

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I am going to share with you a thought that can change your life. If you listen, if you really work with the concept that I am going to share with you, I can say with confidence that you will never be quite the same again. In the writings of the Apostle Paul, there appears an idea that has been taught and emphasized often, which we can consider very seriously as basic for an understanding of the changing experiences of our lives. He says, “And we know that to them that love God, all things work together for good, even to them that are called according to His purpose.” [Romans 8:28] Now, the key word here is “together.” All things work together for our good.

Our insight does not render us capable of judging current happenings as to whether they are good or not good. We tend to pick out things that strike us wrong as isolated, unreasonable happenings. But things work together to formulate a pattern that ultimately unfolds in our lives. Looking back, we can pick out things that have gone together to create a beneficial situation. At the time they happened, it is very difficult to see any Cosmic Pattern forming. Yet pieced together and evolving, these things may have a tremendous result, which we can hardly foresee at the beginning or even imagine at the time.

Seeds of blessing are hidden in all that can be described as crises or catastrophes—seeds of blessing. In the most trying, even tragic, experience there is the possibility of good as an outworking, and the end result of course depends upon our attitude, upon the way we deal with it. Insisting that a situation is “simply awful,” as we so often do, and holding to the attitude that “this is terrible,” thwarts the seed of blessing and quite often points the way to the negative thing that we continue to see it as being. But, acknowledging the truth about it, insisting that good is present in all things and situations, will tune in your consciousness, your mind, your whole thought process to the Divine Activity of unfoldment.

The classic example of this is the Biblical Story of Joseph, who, you may recall, was mistreated and betrayed and eventually sold into slavery by his jealous brothers. And yet, with the right attitude, Joseph evolved into a successful ruler of Egypt and was eventually the savior of his family when they came down to Egypt in the time of famine to beg for support and for supplies. By a way of forgiving his brothers, Joseph said to them, “Ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good….” [Genesis 50:20]

I am sure that many persons down through the years have been greatly influenced by this frame of mind: “God meant it for good.” No matter what it is, no matter the situation, “God meant it for20good.” Certainly, there have been times for all of us when we have had a small counterpart of Joseph’s experience, when it has appeared that another person’s unjust or irresponsible action has, as we would say, “ruined our life.” Of course, this is not valid. Nobody on earth can ruin your life or take away your chances. All that another person can do is to provide you with the means and justification to ruin your own life, if you so desire—by your willful attitude, by your reaction to what another has done—and only if that is the way you choose to meet the situation. But the choice is always yours. You always have that choice. You can take a positive attitude; you can know that eventually only good will come and that all things will work together only for your good.

I have found it personally helpful to hold to this realization as expressed in the affirmation: “I attract to myself only that which I have the ability to turn into a blessing.” I know that if you hold to this bold statement and accept it as true, you can take credit for wondrous ability and wisdom.

In every person’s life there have been instances that seem completely hopeless and shattering and at the time. It takes a lot of perception and patience to see blessings and gains in such experiences. But we can learn to see hidden values in what appears to be useless, negative, even forbidding and ugly . You see, we are creatures of choice. We are free to go down into defeat, if we permit ourselves to do so, or we are free to transform the seemingly unwanted experience into something good, simply by holding to the realization that “All Things Work Together for Good,” and that we attract only that which we can turn into a blessing.

So many famous people have found that their greatest success grew out of events which, at close range, had appeared to be anything but good. As a good example, A. J. Cronin,* who was a physician, stated that a spell of sickness was the turning point of his own career. He was forced to rest for six months, away from his work, in the country. Whereupon, he turned to writing and discovered a real talent that gained him great success as an author of some of the finest novels of modern time.

At the end of his contract with MGM, film director Ernest Matray went to work for a small independent studio, and some months later, one of the films he directed was hailed by an MGM executive who said, “Why didn’t you turn out work as good as that for us?” Ernest Matray explained, “You never gave me a small enough budget.” Now, that’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? In other words, it is the challenge that brings out the best. The lives and achievements of great people prove the truth that it is not so much what happens to us that counts, but our attitude in the face of it.

Our need is to know that life is good—not made up of good and evil, happiness and unhappiness, joy and grief, but simply, LIFE IS GOOD. There certainly is a great deal of immediate factual truth in such comments as, “Well, you can’t win `em all,” or “Into every life some rain must fall.” But the deep fundamental truth is that life is good and that all things—all things, even seeming loss and failure and pain and darkness—all things are about the means of leading you to the greater awareness that life is good…and you only have to open your eyes. When things go wrong and that which you cherish goes awry, when you cease to wonder what made things get out of order, you must direct your thoughts to the positive realization that there is a Divine Process at the very center of your being, which can repair it and that will lead you to greater awareness of your own potential and the goodness of life.

So then, the important thing is: Count it all gain. No matter what it is, count it all gain, knowing that Lincoln’s great success was a result of his innumerable failures, that Edison’s discovery and development of the incandescent lamp was the product of hundreds of experiments, of which each one was a disappointing failure, and that even the overcoming of Jesus, who “overcame the world of flesh and the devil,” was a final achievement after being “tempted on all points such as we.”

In Margaret Lee Runbeck’s* book, Answers Without Ceasing, she tells of a young boy who is disappointed that he did not get a new bicycle for Christmas. He said, “I kind of had my heart set on a bicycle. I wanted one something awful. Instead, I got an encyclopedia. In the afternoon, I got to thinking and hiked up to my favorite place on the hills above my house and decided that even if I had gotten the bicycle, I couldn’t even see it from up there. So I made believe that climbing up was like growing up, when I wouldn’t need a bicycle. And then pretending to look back down on myself, I saw the bicycle as not really all that important, but an encyclopedia is something very instructive. And I know that when I really grow up, I will have the encyclopedia in me, and the old bicycle, if I had one, would be all worn out and everything.” In a very youthful way, you see, this boy was trying to count it all gain, to see the good in it, to know that somehow the disappointment in his life would work for good. And the brave words that formed themselves in his consciousness played a very vital role in the development of the nuclear physicist that this young lad became when he grew up. All Things Work Together for Good. The important thing is he was able to see it, to identify with it and to be en riched because of it. One of the most important lessons in life is the realization that it is not the adversity experienced or the crisis encountered or the disappointments or the heartaches met that determine what life becomes to us, but it is the attitude with which we meet these things.

Yes, it is the attitude that counts. As I say so often, you may not be able to change things and alter the course of events, but you can always choose the thoughts you think about them. You always have a choice. You have that option to think whatever way you want to think; and if you think positively, then you tune in on the “All Things Work Together for Good” process. You can determine the attitude; you can know that there is gain; you can affirm that there is good in everything and deal with it and accept it. It takes mind conditioning to really believe that life is good…a lot of discipline and a lot of practice. Every experience is an opportunity to prove this. Those who respect the Law of Mind Action, the Law of the Omnipresence of God, who meet all experiences in the realization that they attract only that which they have the ability to turn into a blessing, these persons will constantly unfold the means and the power of meeting things, of rising above them, and of being enriched and bettered by them.

Remember Shakespeare’s great thought—one of the great bits of wisdom of all time:

“Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;And this our life exempt from public haunt
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.”

– As You Like It - Act II, Scene I

Written by Eric Butterworth.
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