everything has a purpose

Judas has always been personified as a villain, the contrabida inthe story of Jesus. He was a traitor who sold Jesus out for thirty pieces of silver. But imagine what it would have been like without a Judas? Imagine what it would have been like and how the story would have ended without Judas?
Surely his betrayal has a purpose. Even though how repugnant it is to us now, that act of Judas was something needed, it was something essential to the plot that became the peak of salvation history.


Sometimes, even though I may have realized them only as hindsight, even the most embarrassing and the most difficult obstacles in my life happened for a purpose. I may call it then as something evil, I may even have wanted to avoid them, and I may have even regretted those things. But looking back at these things one realizes that it did not just happen without a reason. It was there for a purpose.
Last night I attended the gathering of class who graduated here two years ago. Only two were absent. They shared their realizations some after a year of regency, others after a year in theology.
The underlying current in the sharing is this: despite the insecurity of leaving behind a world they have been secure with, despite the confusion of the big wide world that they entered into, God seemed to have placed them exactly where they needed to be. In the regency they were made to confront the insecurities that they were avoiding in the past while they were here in the seminary. In theology they were made to confront the things that they needed to face despite the hesitation, brought into a situation where the stark reality of a less than ideal world has to be embraced.
Everything has a purpose - even those which we at first hesitantly accepted and even avoided. Everything has a purpose.