The physical world declares the glory and goodness of God.  Maybe a really practical out working of this is to go out and see, and smell and touch God’s world, to refresh your soul in the sheer expanse of God’s ordering, providing, and caring beyond your suffering.  Not to minimise it, but to remind yourself it is not all pain.  Creation is not unrestrained or disordered chaos.  It is good and God cares.

Suffering shrinks our perspective.  When you stub your toe it feels as if your whole body is crying out in agony.  You’re acutely aware of the throbbing pain so much so that it consumes you.  You aren’t aware of every other system in your body working as they should, its amazing intricacies and order, just the pain in your toe.  Suffering is like that – it shrinks our horizons to just the pain we feel.  It makes it hard to see any good beyond the pain we’re in.  That’s what’s happened to Job and so God in this chapter is opening his eyes to the amazing order and goodness in God’s creation even post fall.  Job wonders is God in control of creation or is it all chaos unchecked, but here God shows him the amazing scale and order in creation.
Every time God asks “Where were you…?”, or “Who marked off…?”, or “Have you ever…?”  Or “Can you…?”  Easy to answer questions.  He’s showing Job that though Job can’t create, mark off, order, bind, or even go to these places or things God has and does.  Every question that invites the answer ‘No, I can’t but you alone LORD can’ is showing Job that his deepest fears about God, those dark whisperings that God isn’t good, isn’t in control, that creation is all chaos and darkness that have begun to wrap their tendrils round his heart aren’t true.
God begins by going back to creation (4-7)and his laying the foundations and marking off the dimensions of the earth, that caused the angels to shout for joy.  The world doesn’t spin off it’s axis or out of its orbit because God ordered it just so.
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My depression is a thing that exists. Therefore, God is using it to conform me more to the image of Christ, to conform believers around me more to the image of Christ, to potentially bring other elect members of the kingdom to the point of faith so that they become more like Jesus, and in some mad way to do something or other for people I have never met but who in God’s infinite and intricately weaved tapestry of history and circumstance, are somehow affected for their good too and they will become more like Jesus through it.

Somebody asked me yesterday whether I thought my getting depression was part of God’s plan. I thought that was a really interesting question and thought I would share my view on that here. If you can’t be bothered to read past this sentence, the short answer is, yes I do.
Here is the thing, I believe God is ultimately sovereign. He is sovereign over all things. There is not a single thing, in the whole of creation, that does not happen without God’s permission to do so. The Bible is unequivocal about God’s total and complete sovereignty.
If that is true, then simply the fact that I have depression means that it is, in some way, part of God’s plan. If God is sovereign over all things (and he is), then there isn’t anything that happens that is not part of his plan. Even his decision not to act, not to intervene, is a sovereign decision. If God chooses not to stop something that he could otherwise stop, he must be allowing it for his greater purposes. If God is sovereign over all things, there is nothing that happens that he could not stop and nothing that doesn’t happen that he could have chosen to make happen. Everything that does happen, happens because God either actively causes it or sovereignly permits it. It is as the Bible says, he is the one who ‘works all things according to the counsel of his will’.
The issue is, when it comes to stuff like depression, the inevitable question is: do you think God is happy that you’re ill? The short answer is, no. I don’t think God is any happier at the thought of me being ill than he is at the thought of people sinning. This inevitably leads to a follow up question, then why doesn’t he stop it?
The answer is that God orders his priorities. The Bible tells us, for example, that God does not wish for any to perish, but longs for all people to be saved. At the same time, we know that not everyone is saved. How do we account for this? Philosophers, at this point, like to posit the principle of sufficient reason. God wants all people to be saved, but he has a sufficient reason to allow them not to be. Depending on your particular theological bent, you will offer different answers as to what that sufficient reason is. But it is no different to us saying I would like to save £200 every month, but I would also like to buy a load of stuff too. One of those priorities tends to trump the other, meaning that though I would like both, I order my priorities, which is why my bank account is less full than I might otherwise like it to be. Similarly, God orders his priorities such that, though he may want all to be saved, he has higher priorities that mean all are not in actuality saved.
So, where does that leave us when it comes to my depression? It is certainly something that happened in actuality, so I consider it part of God’s plan. Does God want me to have depression? I don’t think he is pleased at the thought of me being sick. Nevertheless, that it has happened tells me he has some greater purpose in allowing it to happen. But, let’s be honest, we all want to know what that greater purpose is.
As a Reformed believer, I think God orders all things so that he will receive maximal glory. So, God’s highest priority is his own glory. What this means is that God has setup the world so that the world as it is – out of every possible world he might have created – brings him the greatest glory.
I cannot explain how each and every thing works ultimately to the praise and glory of God. I can have a guess at how some things – even some pretty heinous things – might ultimately work to his glory. But I am ultimately only guessing. I can highlight how some objectively terrible things definitely work to his glory because the Bible expressly tells us so. The cross of Jesus Christ – which was a gross injustice of the highest order and severe suffering of the very worst kind – was the very means by which God glorified himself most. It was his means of salvation for his people, the means of glorifying Christ, the means of becoming both just and justifier. Through something so heinous, God was ultimately glorified. But I must admit I can’t explain how every terrible thing that ever happens works to God’s glory that way. I trust what God’s word says, that such things will brings him more glory in the end than if it hadn’t happened at all, and I can have my guesses about what some of that might be, but that is all they are likely to be.

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Homeschooled children are certainly not immune from depression or other forms of mental illness, but their situation allows for greater social stability and positive interaction in the face of COVID-19. Their social circle is founded not on a massive faceless institution, but on the more intimate confines of the home and family. The greater degree of control that responsible parents have over the social circle of their homeschooled children both expands the number and types of people they interact with while limiting negative socialization.

After more than a year of remote learning, students in New York City finally went back to school. Sadly, the city’s Department of Education fear of COVID-19 and servitude to teachers’ unions means that these schools will more closely resemble Siberian gulags than places of learning.
A recent opinion piece in the New York Post details the ridiculous lengths that many of Gotham’s schools are going to in order to defeat the virus, including “masked and distanced” recess, health concerns over many sports and other extracurricular activities that require “increased exhalation,” and the cancellation of field trips, group projects, and class parties. Despite returning to school, New York City kids are still forbidden from connecting meaningfully with their peers.
Ask any homeschooling parent to discuss the pushback that he’s received from friends and family over the years and he’ll tell you that the need for his children to be “properly socialized” has topped the list of concerns. “How will your kids learn to interact with different kinds of people if they don’t go to school?” these mostly well-meaning people ask, implying that learning at home will doom your children to a life of misanthropic isolation.
The long-standing myth that homeschooled children grow up to be socially awkward is easily debunked because it proceeds from the false (indeed, patently absurd) premise that, prior to the advent of mass public schooling in the mid-nineteenth century, children did not learn to get along with either their peers or other social groups.  This myth persists despite multiple studies that reveal that a majority of homeschooled children are just as well-socialized (or even better socialized) than their public school peers.  The socialization process is somewhat different for homeschooling parents, but these differences (largely in parental supervision and diversity of age range in social groups) are key benefits of homeschooling, not flaws.
For decades, members of the educational establishment have used the need for socialization to argue that kids are better off in government-run schools than being taught at home. Recent developments in American education during the Age of COVID, however, reveal that this argument is not just fundamentally flawed, but officially dead.
Newsflash: Masks and Social Distancing Make Socialization Difficult
Claims about the social benefits of modern K-12 education never made much sense to begin with. In this model, instead of organically meeting and interacting with others through a variety of community institutions (neighborhoods, churches, etc.), children spend most of their social time being forced to engage with a very small subset of individuals: those who were born within a few months of them.
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