I bought a White Tennessee Walking horse one time. The guy who sold it to me, a well-seasoned cowboy and knowledgeable horseman in the “horse whisperer” tradition, kept referring to my horse as a “gray”.
“Huh? He is a white horse, why do you keep calling him a gray?”
“Because they are called grays.”
“Oh.”
I nonchalantly told one of my workers not to work the “gray”, because I had a horse trainer coming in to work this particular horse for a couple of months. He shook his head ok, and it was obvious that he had learned the proper gray/white nomenclature sometime in his past.
I already had one gray and now I have two grays. (See I am getting the hang of it.)
In similar fashion some things don’t seem right to us and yet the Bible tells us that is “the way it is”. No one fully understands death, particularly premature death. No one understands sickness, tragedy, and other maladies, but they exist for now and we need to take things as they are and not as we think they should be.
I might think, “What would be the harm in going fishing on Sunday?” God tells me it is not right and that is His day, and I should be in church on Sunday. That is just “the way it is”.
Some things need to be taken on faith. When I really get discouraged and wonder just what the heck is going on, I think of Jesus voluntarily leaving paradise and coming to this wicked world to be spit upon, ridiculed, beaten, whipped, crucified, and put to death for no other reason than so that through His sacrifice we can be saved and escape the blackness of this evil world. The only reason that He did that is because He loves us more than we can imagine. If He loves us that much then He must have a good reason for declaring that is just “the way it is”.
Knowing the foregoing reassures me that my Lord and Savior loves me and is moving towards purifying me and preparing me for an eternity of bliss and is just “the way it is””.
Ahh I feel better now, except that does not explain why a white horse is called a “gray”.
Proverbs 14:12
There is a way that seems right
to a man,
But its end is the way of death.