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PRAYER FOR THE WEEK
Jesus, help me deal well with the things that "just happen" in life, instead of looking for a reason to make myself feel better! Amen.

Jesus saw a blind man begging. "Whose fault is it that he's blind -- his or his parents'?" Jesus' followers asked. "Neither," Jesus said. "He's blind so others can see God's power in him." Then Jesus healed the man. People kept asking, "How did Jesus cure you?" The man replied: "Only someone from God could." And he followed Jesus.

"Why did this happen?" you yell, looking at something awful: your science project, ruined by the juice you spilled all over it; your ankle, in a cast after you tripped and fell.

When hard things happen, everyone wants a reason. You want to make sense of why and how this could happen, hoping that having a reason might make you feel a little better.

One of the hardest things for people to understand is that, sometimes, things just happen. This week's Gospel (John 9:1-41) proves that people were arguing about it even in Jesus' time.

When Jesus meets a man who is blind, people are looking for a reason. Back then, there were no services available to help someone who had a disability, so the man was stuck begging to survive. People thought he or his parents might have done something awful and been cursed by God for him to have ended up with such a hard life.

Jesus set them straight: God hadn't inflicted blindness on the man or given him a hard life as some kind of payment for sins. Still, the man's disability and his meeting Jesus could be put to a good purpose: showing God's power. In healing the man, Jesus showed He was the Son of God, and the man in turn showed his tremendous faith in God.

Your science project got ruined just because your elbow hit a glass of juice. You broke your ankle just because, sometimes, people fall down. It doesn't mean God's out to get you -- but it is an opportunity for you to deal with hard stuff in a good way.

After he was healed, the blind man followed Jesus. What will you do?[[In-content Ad]]

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