evidence: God sends His sun to rise on both the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. That is an important truth to put on the sticky side of your brain. Just because you are living a life sold out for God does not mean you will not face adversity. In fact because we live in a fallen world, full of sin, and have a real enemy, Satan, there will always be warfare…See Ephesians 6:10-17. As I was talking with my wife about this post and the "Rose Garden" song, she made this astute point that along with the beauty of the rose comes the thorns. Much like the verse from Matthew 5:44-45, there’s a great paradox that exists with the rose…There’s beauty and ugliness…delicateness and jaggedness…joy and pain. I think it is a great symbol for what God wants to speak into our hearts today. Abraham Lincoln once said, [...] And ultimately that is what we all need, a different perspective! If I may go back to the imagery of the rose and thorn, when Jesus was being prepared to die on the cross, it says in John 19:2 (NLT) that, "The soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on His head, and they put a purple robe on Him." [...] No matter what happens in life, we can be thankful this truth!!