learning to do what is good

Some things are bad for you. You don't want to do them because you know they will hurt you. Sticking a knife into your foot will hurt you. There is nothing good in it.

Some things are not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but are bad if they are misused. Eating jellybeans is great, but if you eat nothing but jellybeans, you'll die of malnutrition.

A person that is mature tries not to do the things that will hurt him, and to learn to do the other things in the way that is good.

That's part of growing up, learning to do what is good.

However, with some people, it takes a while to learn these things.

There are some people that learn them right away, maybe because they are smarter, or maybe they are afraid of negative consequences, or whatever.

Other people only learn to do the right things when they get older after they have stuck too many knives in their feet, or gotten sick too many times on jellybeans.

But the learning is the important thing. What matters is not the road you already have traveled, but whether or not you have learned anything from it.

God doesn't look at our past, at the stupid things we did or the length of time it took to learn not to do them. He looks at us and who we are and how we are right now.

That is how His grace works. God's grace says that if we are His child, where we have come from is not important. It is where we are that counts.

That doesn't mean we can do anything we want and figure He'll say "Fine." It means that if we really learn from the road and know that it is only Him who can change our lives for the better, He will save us and make us His children.

After all, He loves us and wants us to learn to do better. He doesn't want us to be hurt; He wants us to be happy. And He knows that we will never be happy in our old lives, doing silly things and hurting ourselves unnecessarily.

Let Him into your life. Psalm 30:11 says he will change your wailing into dancing, and clothe you with joy. He will make your life great.