Some years ago, I taught a student whose father had upped and left her, her sister, and her mother when she was about ten years old.  He did so abruptly, one day announcing to her mother that he was finished with her and the girls and was moving out to be with a much younger woman.
     Mom, sister, and my student were devastated.  Whenever I discussed the situation with her or her mother, however, her mother always told me, "God is good all the time."
     To someone on the outside of faith, this seems incredulous.  Why call God good when one has experienced such tragedy?  In a much more recent conversation I had with a Jewish rabbi friend, I thought about my student and her mother again.  My friend was talking about Psalm 27.  Much of the psalm, he said, is a lament to God, a lament about God's indifference to the writer's pain.  I concurred.  And, he added, despite the penultimate line's call to believe in the power of God in the "land of the living," the psalm closes with an admonition to "wait" on the Lord.  In other words, you may not see God's activity, but you are nonetheless to hope in him.
     Look at Psalm 150 (the last psalm in the Bible), my friend went on.  Its final words are a call to "praise the Lord."  Let everything that has breath, it says, says over and over, praise God.
     The rabbi's observations reminded me of those of my student's mother.  Unless we believe that God is good all the time, we may as well not believe he is good at all.  Unless we are willing to praise and laud God all the time, we may as well not do so at all.  We cannot pick and choose among what we perceive to be the actions of God when we cannot see all the ways in which he is working in this life.  It's disingenuous.  And misleading.
     Yet so very difficult to avoid doing.  God is good in a fallen world, a fallen world that misfires all too frequently.  Unless we believe he is always good, unless we are willing to acknowledge him as good all the time, however, we reduce God to a whim of our pain. He's meaningless.
     As is the world.