What is a good thing in life?

In practice, human beings narrow down the definition of this word to mean something that is expressly positive, which adds to human happiness. As such things like birth, marriage, employment, love and possessing money, cars, houses and so on constitute the list of good things in human life and living.
Conversely, the negatives of the above mentioned positives like death, divorce, joblessness, hate, and lack of positive possessions make the list of the bad things in human life.
However, these definitions of a good thing are misleading as what appears to be a good thing today may turn out to be a very bad thing tomorrow. The above definitions are incomplete because they only take into account natural factors that affect human life while omitting the more important spiritual forces that are at play in human life as well.    
To illustrate the shortfalls of the above definitions and our ignorance of what is good for us I will use the life and death of my late Christian brother as an example. Let us say his name was Pat. Pat was an orphan and we stayed together as close brothers. Pat was unemployed and it was a bad thing both in his and my sight. So we decided to get rid of the bad thing in his life and we prayed to God for him to get a job.
As divine providence would have it he got a job and we praised God for giving us a good thing in the family. Months passed each of us going to his respective work every morning and reuniting in the evening. But one day Pat went to his work in the morning and failed to return as he got killed in a car accident while crossing a busy road. That was really bad.
Human reason got the best of me in trying to establish how the accident and subsequently his death could have been avoided.
 First I thought that his getting a job was, with the benefit of hindsight, never a good thing because if he had not been employed in the first place there was no way he was going to be hit by a car near his workplace.
 Secondly, I reversed my thinking about cars. I used to think they were good things as fast means of transport. By when my brother was killed by a car they became evil to me as I began to regard them as weapons of destruction.  I was fully convinced cars were very bad until we needed to carry Pat’s body to his rural area for burial.
All of a sudden I realised that only a car could safely, conveniently and quickly transport his body. So I changed again and began to view a car as a good thing and guess what I enjoyed my journey to and from Pat’s rural area in a Prado. What at one time was a bad thing turn around and became a good thing.
And what is more! Pat’s death was a bad thing to me and others who are still alive. But fear of death haunts us, to imagine we shall die one day makes death really bad.
However, to Pat who died in Christ, there is no longer any death, nor sorrow , nor sickness, nor involvement in car accidents and this, you bet, makes death a very good thing, does it not? Please forgive me I do not know what is good for me.  But the question still remains, what is a good thing? Well let us delve into the anatomy of a good thing in the next article.
– For prayer and counseling call 011877180 or e-mail mairos78@yahoo.co.uk