Have you met someone who talks about what SHOULD HAVE BEEN? You hear it in the stories they tell, the score cards that are shown. Expectations not met are a retained disappointment. You hear how the job should have been better, how they should have been treated, and you hear how life and all the disappointments should not have happened.

But that’s not how life is. Life is messy and it is disappointing.

And yet, we who love The Lord, know that His mercies are new every morning. We know that the summation of our following Jesus is not found in how few disappointments we have but rather in the love, mercy, and strength we find in the presence of Jesus and the filling of our hearts and minds with His Spirit.

How should it have gone? Better, maybe. But what if we change the discussion to how we saw God in the circumstance and how we learned from that experience? What we looked for those “new mercies” and then shared that good news with others. We don’t have to be preachy – we just have to tell OUR story.

I’m always taken by the story out of John 9, a man born blind, and the disciples want to know “why was he born blind?” And Jesus gives them a lesson in life and restores the man’s sight, an act that really gets under the skin of the religious leaders. Those leaders grill the man with restored sight about how this happened, as if you can explain a miracle?!

His response – I don’t know, I just don’t know. What I DO know is that I was blind, but not now. Now I can see!!

It was the scroll of Isaiah that Jesus took and read in the synagogue that said: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord’. ” – Luke 4

And so to us? How has balling in behind Jesus to follow Him, how has that changed you? What is your “I don’t know about that, but I do know I was ______ but now I am ______!

Here’s the real story about how things SHOULD have been! I should have been blind = but I’m not the blind man would say. And so we change the tone from disappointment to amazement. Jesus has made a difference that we could not.

Tell that to your coffee group, your family, your workmates!