No circumstance disqualifies us from hearing (and saying) “Yes” to the kingdom of God.
Humans love to compartmentalize. We wade through our days and load up circumstances into the two buckets of what we call “good” and “bad”. We toil through life trying to control the flow of water into the good bucket. In our frazzled efforts, one thing we rarely do is stop to evaluate our perspective on the buckets – what we define as “good” and “bad”.
All circumstances are an opportunity. All of them. They are all valuable. Every one is useful. At a minimum, each circumstance is an opportunity to exercise faith, an amazing activity we will only be able to do in this life. No event can be discarded as unimportant. From the mundane to the tragic, everything that happens to us opens an avenue of availability to exercise faith in relationship with God and one another.
God is transcendent over our compartmentalizing. He is there through it all. We might say “no” to God’s promises. We attempt to control or compartmentalize on our own terms. But God’s promises are always “Yes” anyways. His invitation is there for us to say “Yes” as well. The choice to perceive his truth belongs to us. The choice to participate in “Yes” is ours.