the you God wants

So, I just finished reading a book called The Me I Want to Be by John Ortberg. The premise of the book is that God desires to make us the best version of us we could possibly be. As we grow and become more and more like Christ, we become more and more of the best "you" we could be. A good book.

Anyways, there was a section on how our experiences and circumstances shape us. There was a couple of sentences that I read that have really stuck with me: "God isn't at work producing the circumstances you want. God is at work in bad circumstances producing the you he wants." Since I read that a couple of days ago I have been thinking about it.

So often we try to get God to make our circumstances what we think is best for us. We want our life to be easy. We want everything that happens to us and to those we love to be good. We want to avoid pain or hard times at any cost. But, maybe this is not the best for us. If God works through hard times, through pain to make us into who He wants us to be, then maybe we do ourselves a bit of a disservice when we try to avoid those things in our lives and the lives of our loved ones.