My wife Tammy and I just recently finished watching a Netflix show called "Manifest." It's kind of a fantasy drama, based on Romans 8:28, We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

The premise is that a plane full of people get on Flight 828, but when they land, they find out five and a half years have gone by since they took off. The world considered them lost, but they landed like they thought everything was normal, except they landed in a world where over 5 years have gone by, and many of their loved ones have moved on without them.

I recommend the show for anyone who watches Netflix shows. It's not perfect in its theology, but it's good enough to generate a lot of good conversation, it's thought-provoking, and it does tackle questions like: What does it mean that "all things work [together] for good"? I don't want to spoil it, but it also very subtly takes on the question: Does this mean "all things work together for the good of everyone? and you already know the answer to that, because that's not what the passage says, and yet people in the show are constantly quoting it as though it means everything works out good for everyone, but all the while the events in the show question that premise. So you might want to check it out.

On a side note, I was working with this passage in my book on prayer in the early church (the one coming out in the spring) and I had to note - in my ongoing crusade against lamentable translation errors - that it really should not be read: We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose. That's because "who are called according to his purpose" makes no sense, since what would it mean to be called, but not according to his purpose? The phrase, "according to his purpose" should go with "all things work for good" - in other words, here is how Romans 8:28 should really be translated:

We know that all things work for good, according to his purpose, for those who love God, who are called.

You could paraphrase it like this:

We trust that, for everyone who is called by God and who has responded to that call by loving God - for those people - everything works together toward the good, according to his will.

In other words, what is "good" is defined by the will of God, not by our definition of good, and not by our limited view of what is good (or comfortable) for us right now. It is often the case that what is good is painful. Nasty-tasting medicine, painful surgery, a parent's discipline of a child - none of these things feel good in the short term, and yet they are good in the long term. And so God's providence, that divine "everything working together" is always with the big picture in mind - which is a picture we cannot see.