I always start a Friday with some circumspection. I’m in a good mood because it is the end of the week, but I always watch out for what I call the “Friday Troubles”. It seems like Fridays are a good day for everyone to unload whatever they want on everyone else and try and get the monkey off their backs. I once had a lawyer tell me that it is an unwritten thing in the legal world that when an attorney wants to be nasty they serve their lawsuits on Friday afternoons to just ruin the other party’s weekend. My phenomenon was that on Friday afternoons around 3pm I could expect some form of “trouble”. It might be someone that was not happy and wanted to leave that on my doorstep for the weekend or that someone had something urgent that needed to be delivered by Monday morning. Sometimes big things, sometimes small, but troubling all the same. Over the years I learned how to deal with those troubles (and the troubles throughout all of the week) but it was not until the last few years that I could look at those troubles as good things that were there to make me better. And even that sounds a little too Polly Ann-ish when those troubles really are troubling. But you see that is how God wants us to approach our troubles. He wants us to recognize them for what they are (don’t deny unrealistically) and then to stare them down as challenges that will pass and make us stronger. We are to do that with a positive attitude. We are taught this in 2 Corinthians 4:17: “For our present troubles are quite small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us an immeasurably great glory that will last forever!” Paul was talking about different kinds of troubles but troubles are troubles in the eyes of God if we hand them over to Him. We all have our different ones, but if we hand them over to Him then we can know that our dealing with them will pass but in how we deal with them comes the lessons, the learning, the growth and ultimately the glory. In today’s business environment there is plenty of trouble to go around. On this Friday don’t miss the opportunity to let your troubles know that you know that they are not here forever and that you are going to make glory from them. You might be really surprised just how less troubling they are now than they were before.

Reference: 2 Corinthians 4:17 (New Living Testament)