A chance to live

The woman closes her eyes, as if to shut out the memory that still haunts her. But her mind takes her back regardless of her efforts not to remember...

He returns home one Saturday night after another night at the pub. She hears his heavy, irregular footsteps as he clumsily heads for the kitchen. She knows he will be drunk (he always is), and she knows he will come and find her. "Why isn't my dinner waiting for me on table?", he will shout, throwing out his fist to cast her to the floor like an unwanted dog. She holds her little girls close and waits for the inevitable shout...

She turns to her now older daughter, a spitting image of her grandmother at nineteen years of age. "If I had have known you would go through all of that suffering, I would never have had kids", she tells her.

The wisdom of her daughters continues to surprise her: "No, Mum. I'm thankful that you did have us. Yes, there's been hard times, but we've got through it all. I'm just grateful that we have been given the chance to live."

* * *

A lot of us wonder sometimes why God created people if he knew they would do wrong. Of course, when God created Adam and Eve, they were good - they chose to love God out of their own free will. But then they chose to turn away from Him and live their own way. They handed themselves over to evil - and God's perfect world became corrupt and sinful. So why did God create people, seeing as he knows all things and he would have known the world would turn out this way?

It is because he wanted so much to have relationship with us, his creation. Even though there would be trouble in the world, and suffering, and even though it would cost his only Son to make it possible for us to have relationship with him again, God knew it would be worth it. He gave us a chance to live - a chance to do things the right way, a chance to make some good in this fallen world, a chance to choose to love Him. You've got your chance. Are you going to take it?