(this was a 30 minute talk given to women in the church)

“He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, And the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, to console those who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified” (Isa. 61:1-3).

This is what Jesus Christ does for us. Imagine a Commander giving orders to his generals on what ground he wanted them to take. To the first one he says, “I want you to take that forest.” The general saluted and left. To the second he says, “I want you to take those hills.” This general also left. To the third he says, “I want you to take the top of that cliff by scaling straight up it. Oh, and one more thing, you will be in a wheel chair without the use of your legs. Now go.”

The third man hesitated and said, “But sir, it is impossible!” And, the Commander says, “Don’t worry, for I’ll be with you and I have the power to lift you up even over that sheer cliff.”

“He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him and honor him” (Psa. 91:15).

God gives the trial He has allotted for each of us, and He determines the beginning, the severity, and the end. For some it is a forest, for some a hill and for some a cliff, but in His mercy, He tells them that He will go with them, and with that help they really can scale an impossible mountain.

For those of you who have not already been given your assignment of trial to conquer it might be relatively easy to think, ‘of course I’ll be strong enough to scale any mountain because I feel confident I am able to handle it’. But there is something that you must realize first before you even attempt to scale anything, and it is this: we are all weak apart from God. Every single last one of us. And you can’t scale a mountain, up a sheer cliff, in a wheel chair so to speak, without God. It can’t be done. Why you can’t even make your own heart beat!

“For by You I can run against a troop, by my God I can leap over a wall” (Psa. 18:29).

Everyone has a breaking point and God could reduce any one of us to a jelly if He hammers long and hard enough. So, no, on your own you aren’t strong enough. But He knows this and He is going somewhere with it. There is a plan that is for an ultimate good. And, He knows how far He can push you to accomplish His purposes.

All that you need to know is, He will never give you more than you can handle with Him, He is good, and He will use it for good because He loves you.

“No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make the way of escape, that you may be able to bear it” (I Cor. 10:13).

“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God,to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Rom 8:28).

In fact, part of the reason for the trial is for you to learn to lean on Him and gain what is precious, becoming more like Christ. He does take our hand and lead us through the toughest water and with this strength we can scale a cliff, because He is the hedge that keeps us from falling. He can be trusted. If I’ve learned anything in my ten years of winter, it is that He can be trusted, even if He takes you far, far beyond what you thought you could have handled.

And for me, I thought He had done just that. But God had been merciful and gave us a series of smaller trials to test us first in the upward cycle of ‘struggle, learn, grow’, to prepare us for the much bigger ones. And we stand on the back of what we learn from previous trials to handle the next ones. So what was my situation that I learned to trust Him in? We have had a hard yet good life on the mission field where we have had continuous trials that felt like we went from the fire into the frying pan. This is par for the course on the front lines where life just isn’t easy.

We are missionaries with the Wycliffe Bible Translators and were assigned to do a translation of the Bible into a little known language called Bakwé, spoken by a people who numbered about 13,000 in the rain forest region of Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast). These people did not have a written language and by the time we arrived, there were only 6 known Christians who were evangelized by mistake at an Assemblies of God rally. The area was accessible by road but had no communication options with the outside world, and little in the way of amenities. This mission was going to be a difficult one in many ways but we were up for it and eager for it.

I will not go into the details here of how we settled in and started, since you can read more about it in my book ‘At the Edge of the Village’ at Canon press, but in summary, we picked a central village, asked for land, built a house from scratch (his meant making each cement brick by hand, installing our own running water with PVC pipes that came out of a large hand-made cistern, and using kerosene lamps for lights).

Once settled in with our two young children, a 2 and a 1 year old, Csaba then had to learn the language without aid of any books to guide him and soon became the only white man in the world fluent in Bakwé. He then had to create the alphabet, analyze out the phonetics and grammar of the language, learn more about the culture to find out how they viewed the world, then find a team of Bakwé men to help him translate.

In the meantime I was pregnant with our third child, and keeping track of little kids on our homestead, trying to keep them out of trouble in the jungle of our backyard where cobras lurked in the forest and a stray croc or two in the hand dug pond. Then, after our fourth child was born, I was quite busy homeschooling them all, managing our menagerie of animals and plants and living on a very basic level, sort of like one step up from camping. I loved it. I also was trying to learn the language too but that didn’t quite happen with everything else. I had a workable knowledge of french on a basic level and I had the Bakwé greetings down. That was pretty much it.

Though challenging, all the above was fine and good, but now let’s add into the mix, living with an aggressive and forthright people who had a vastly different idea about privacy and manners, (all a stone’s throw away). They needed Christ and that was why we were there. The challenge of dealing with them would be a big one but that is not the scope of this talk. On top of the above challenges, there were others. We were dealing on a daily basis with living in the tropics and all the diseases and parasites that were associated with it. Some of these were pretty life threatening and we were far away from a doctor with no internet nor phone. Add into the mix the ever increasing instability of the region with roving armed gangs and later the threat of a civil war that would escalate to where our lives would end up being in danger, and that was the cliff the Lord asked us to take.

Not only that, but it would be hard going and He would ask us to do it without complaining, fear or worry. The bar of obedience wasn’t going to change with each new challenge, it would just make it harder to reach it and that was where God came in. How to handle these things didn’t come all at once but over time.

What is the purpose of trials? Trials are meant to sharpen us, teach us to fight and stand firm in His strength. My intention here is to tell you about some of the trials we went through, and what He taught me through them in hopes that it will bless you as well. You may not have the same trials, but the concepts are the same and everyone can benefit from the fundamentals.

So, what did I learn? How to Trust God with my children. Ok, this is highly ironic but God has a sense of humor in taking someone who is a natural worrier – me, afraid of sickness, death, and suffering, and putting her in Africa way off in the back country in one of the most dangerous places, health wise, on earth (at least where the microbe load is concerned). Well, we were to get some first-hand experience with some of these diseases. Let me tell you about a couple.

Andreas, my second son, was little at the time, about 2 or 3 and he got sick with a virus, and then a few days later he couldn’t walk. We didn’t know what happened, but polio came to our minds, and we knew there was still polio in Africa. He was vaccinated but sometimes the vaccines don’t fully cover. We were 9 hours away from competent medical help and the trip was a long and hard one so we were pretty much on our own. I wondered, does my child have polio or not? What do we do?

How do you, in the face of some perceived danger, train your mind not to default into worry? These types of things don’t come naturally but must be trained into your way of operating. It is like in a war, a soldier is trained not to fear. So, let’s take a look at Ephesians 6:10-18 where you have to put on the whole armor of a warrior. You can go over it yourself more in detail but I want to emphasize taking up ‘the shield of faith’ with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the enemy. Let’s define terms, faith is believing in what you can’t see (Heb.11:1) and I might also add, in what you can’t feel. Women often use feelings as an indicator of reality, ‘I feel, therefore it is,’ where actually, feelings are one of the worst indicators of reality.

So, if you can’t feel God’s presence, it doesn’t mean He is not there. If you feel the world is falling apart, it doesn’t mean that it is. The shield is His promises of who He is and what He will do. And with that shield you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the enemy. These darts are the lies that cause fears, worries, and a lack of hope in God.  That is how the enemy attacks. He will lie to you constantly in a heavy trial that all is hopeless and you might as well save yourself because God won’t. So, what do you do? You stand on those promises, despite how you feel at the moment, you bring up your shield, and use it.

But, as I have said before, it doesn’t happen all at once. If a dart gets through and you are on the floor in a puddle of worry, you need to confess that to God. He then reaches down, pulls you up, puts the shield back in your hand and teaches you how to use it again. Sometimes in learning to fight, you are more down than up, but with perseverance, a lot of confession, and a repeatedly helpful and good God, you learn if you don’t give up. And as you learn, you begin to stand more than you are down. Then as you conquer in an area, you can now stand on the back of what you have learned to help with what is to come, both for yourself and later to help others. That is the concept, ‘struggle, learn, grow.’ Stand on what you learned to use it for what is to come.

So, back to our child not walking, what did we do? We and our cook prayed, looked to God, cried out for help, and the next day Andreas started walking again. I asked a doctor later, who said it might have been a viral arthritic fever, but I don’t know what happened except that we cried out to God, and He answered.

Let me tell you about our other brushes with illness. Malaria is a rather scary disease. It is where a parasite is injected into the blood stream by a mosquito, and for whites, if you don’t treat it successfully it will keep multiplying in your blood stream until it kills you. With Malaria, you’re in a time squeeze to try to find out the right drug before the parasite gets out of control, and the drugs can be dangerous with their side effects. So, one day Csaba spiked a 104 fever in one hour. That would usually mean he had a bad case of malaria that needed knocking down quickly. I hated making medical decisions but there I was by his bed with the various drugs trying to figure out which one to use. If I didn’t pick the right one at first, it would eat up valuable time and, it would probably mean a nine hour trip to the city with an increasingly unstable condition for Csaba, plus driving on crazy African roads with little kids in the car. That alone scared me. So, I looked at the different drugs and their side effects and they made me tempted to fear. Some of the side effects were death and the safer ones might not work due to resistance. What to do? The stakes were high. I didn’t have anywhere else to go and God had to come through. So, I was going to take Him to task and trust Him.

“If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to Him” (James 1:5).

He wanted me to trust Him instead of worry so I was going to do it. I just stopped and prayed and asked God to show me which one to use. A particular drug shot to the forefront of my mind with a great deal of peace with it, so I prayed for protection for Csaba and used it and the fever went down and the malaria was wiped out. This drug was a new and effective drug for the resistant strains but they also were seeing some serious side effects with it, but that was the right drug for us for the moment.

This all prepared us for the next trial, a bigger one – Typhoid. We didn’t know what I had, but I was very, very ill. By now we were standing on the backs of previous trials so we put that into practice. We had just gotten to the village wondering what to do. It is hard to travel back to the city and the traveling alone could really wipe me out. We prayed, asking God to be very specific if we should go back or not. The next day, Csaba was feeling he should pack up and at least be ready.

As he was doing so I felt my strength start to slip away. It was the weirdest feeling. Like there was no bottom and I was going under. As I was feeling this I felt the words shoot into my head, “I could take you.” My first reaction was “What about Csaba and the children, who will take care of them?” I felt the words again say, “I will take care of them.” And I knew He would. Then I released them all and felt a peace. At the same time this was happening, Csaba was looking down at me on the bed and these words shot into his head, “I could take her.”

Csaba struggled with that but finally handed it over to God to submit to His will and felt peace. At that moment I felt the ground come back up under me and I no longer felt I was slipping down. I was still very ill but it didn’t feel like I would die anytime soon anymore, and that was reassuring. It also was all the confirmation that Csaba needed to get us right back to the city. After that, it was a long road ahead for me, 1 1/2 years of a hard going recovery with the Typhoid but at least I knew that God would take care of us.

So, did the trials end there? Was that more than anyone should have to go through in their life? I thought so, but not according to God. He was going to use the last trial for us to stand on so we could tackle the next, bigger trial.

In the meantime, there were still more tests and trials that we learned in the ‘struggle, learn, grow’ process. By now we had gone through threats by local armed gangs, and a violent election where we had to hunker down and wait out the unrest until the presidential elections were over. Then there was more sickness, some snake encounters, all getting us ready for the bigger ones which started with a growing weakness in my own body that no one had an answer for. Being weak on the mission field, where life was hard was a challenge, but that was only the beginning. After a couple years, we decided to go back on furlough for six months to look at colleges for Hans, and we never went back because a war broke out that would also break our hearts as we watched the country that we knew and the people that we loved go into deep turmoil.

Then when we tried to go back in a brief lull, we never made it to the village because we ended up arriving at a time where armed mobs were out to get the French. Since we looked very French being white, we had to escape out of the country in one piece, and that wasn’t going to be easy. Especially since there were death threats out for the French coming over the radio. So we ended up entering Ivory Coast in actually one of the most dangerous times for whites in the history of the nation and we are still confident that God wanted us there, even lead us there for a reason.

The country had been unstable but there was an uneasy peace at the moment so we wanted to head up to the village. But, we stopped in at the guest house in San Pédro on the ocean first so I could recover from the trip and regain a little strength. While there, something happened in the nation, that I don’t have time to go into, that would cause riots and mobs all over the nation to take to the streets looking for French people with the intent to harm them and loot their property.

We were supposed to go to the village the next day but couldn’t because of the riots going on around the country. We were told by an inside source that an armed mob would be traveling that night in San Pédro in search for French and we needed to get ready for flight. We were only two families there at that time and each family packed an emergency bag of essentials which included documents, money, a Gideon’s Bible (because they’re small), medications, flashlight and insect repellent. When night fell, the women and children went back to the farthest apartment situated by a back door that led out into the high forest. Csaba and the other husband, Gregg, would be armed with what they had: Gregg with a double headed ax, and Csaba with a machete. They would stay by the gate all night to keep watch. We had walkie-talkies with us and if a gang was coming they would radio for us to slip out into the forest and they would follow, only staying and using the weapons to buy us time to get out. I thought about my husband, “Wow, that’s a man for you. Willing to put himself between us and an armed gang of drunk and dangerous men using only a machete for a weapon.”

Anyhow, the time is too short to go into it all, but three gun shots were fired in the near distance, and Csaba radioed for us to get out into the forest. It wasn’t easy. We should have had some type of fire drill or something before-hand. We were so pathetic, what with trying to wake kids up and them all wanting to use the bathroom before we left, etc. We got out the back door sooner or later with a dog and a parrot who wouldn’t shut up and threatened to blow our cover. I mean the dog didn’t know why we were going into the rain forest in the middle of the night and neither did the parrot and they complained bitterly the whole way. Talk about a stealth mission. We slipped out and took a very dark path in the tall overgrowth and hunkered down. A half hour later Csaba found us and said that we could come back.

The mob hadn’t arrived so it was a false alarm but we could go back to sleep and they would keep watch all night in case they did come. Actually the gang was fairly close but they had stopped at a resort on the beach and looted the bar, the men getting too drunk to move on, so we were spared. I will leave that scene now, even though I am in the process of writing a book on how we did manage to get out of the country, but let me close that scene with this.

After coming out of the forest, with the gun and cannon fire still going on in the distance, I was standing outside with Csaba looking up at the stars. I said, “Look at them. It is so peaceful up there while down here is such turmoil and danger. It is like God doesn’t have a care in the world.” Csaba said, “He doesn’t. God is the same God both here and up there and He is in complete control. That is why He is not worried and neither should we.”

After a harrying and lengthy evacuation that spanned three countries, which eventually ended up in Mali, I immediately got the influenza on top of everything else, and crashed down so dangerously low that our church wanted us to return. But, I was actually too weak to be even wheeled onto an airplane in a wheelchair. We had to wait until I regained enough strength for that. I was really that bad off!

How did it feel? It was a weakness so profound that I didn’t just feel ‘tired’. There wasn’t a word to describe it. I felt like the bottom of life was about to drop out and me with it. It felt more than the weakness of the worst influenza, like one that never ends. Add onto that the feeling of grogginess and fuzzy thinking, like I just woke up in the middle of the night drugged, and you can begin to see what my life was like for many years.

At the worst of it the whole first year I was suffering 24/7. There was no let up. I had little positive coming in outside of my family being around me. I woke up and felt horrid like I had to recover from the night. I then felt horrid all day and needed the night to recover from the day. And so it went for at least a year before it abated somewhat and there began to be small windows for an hour here and there were it went from horrid to a little less horrid.

Csaba was excellent in counseling me during it. When I was lying down on the bed in our apartment in Mali, (the bed was a worn old mattress that I hit the bottom with), he knew he had to get my mind turned in the right direction. So he got me to actively think about things to be grateful for. He said, “Do you have a foam mattress?” (A lot of people don’t in Africa. They sleep on mats on the floor, or the mattress is made of straw). I said, ‘yes I did’, and he told me to be thankful for it. “Do you have a pillow?” I said ‘yes, I did’, and he told me to thank God for that too. So when my mind wanted to go in the gutter of despair, Csaba was teaching me how to fight not to go down there and it was from choosing to thank God for what I did have, even though to me it seemed like I was scraping the barrel. There is always something to thank Him for, so choose to rest there.

“In the multitude of my anxieties within me, your comforts delight my soul” (Psa 94:19).

I did fight to keep my mind up, but I remember during a particularly hard time, I just caved in and gave in to despair. I was to learn that God knew when I couldn’t hold on and would always give me something to lift me up again. It was often His presence.

“If I say ‘my foot slips’, Your mercy, O Lord, will hold me up” (Psa 94:18).

During this particular time I was suffering so much and nothing was relieving me that I went to the sink and turned on the tap to let the water run over my hands, because it felt good and I needed something, anything, to feel good. As I let the water run over my hands I absentmindedly cupped them letting the water fill them. I would then release it only to have the water fill them up again. This went on and on, and every time I emptied my hands the water filled them up again. That was when I felt the words enter my head: “What are you doing?” Me: “Filling my hands with water.” “What happens when you let the water go?” Me: “It fills up again.” “And no matter how many times you empty your hands, it will always keep filling up again because the tap will never run dry since it is connected with a source.”

I was very deeply moved and encouraged by that because I knew no matter how empty I felt or how many more bad things would happen to me, the source of God’s love, strength and help would never run dry. I could count on it.

I did slowly climb up a little over time. Here is the progression. It took 6 months before I could do small tasks like fold clothes. Noai had to take over the kitchen and she really rose up to it.

It took 8 months before I was strong enough to walk into a doctor’s office. It took 18 months before I was strong enough to be wheeled onto an airplane to fly back home before I crashed down again.

I would then spend years, in relative isolation too weak to do much of anything ordinary. For example, I couldn’t sit through a church service, so I would lay down behind the curtain, back stage, etc. I was out of the line of normal fellowship. So, in this state I was to process the great grief and losses from of the war with a foggy brain and emotions that ran chronically low due to my condition. And to make matters more challenging, I am by nature a person who loves to get out in nature, and be with people and be busy doing things, all of which were no longer very feasible for me. And it didn’t look like it would end. I had to make a decision here. Either pull back in bitterness and despair because God was too dangerous, or look at my life the way it was and decide to live it anyhow to the best of my ability and run to the One who gave the trial for comfort and healing. I made the choice to run to Him.

And in that time, God’s presence was there, teaching, giving hope, lifting up. He taught me many things, like how to handle the ‘what ifs?’ Remember, that something was drastically wrong with me and we didn’t know what it was.

Worry is like being in a room with ten shut doors facing you. These doors represent all the possibilities of what might happen in the future about a particular situation that consumes you. Since the future is not yours to know, you don’t actually know which door you will walk through eventually. But there will come a time soon when one door will be opened and you will have to walk through it.

In the meantime, the ‘not knowing’ part is very hard, and you decide to go over to take a peek behind the first door which is labeled ‘Worst case scenario door number one’. You try it and it opens, so you walk through that door and down its virtual path, playing out what could happen if you were to later enter this door. You experience in your mind one ‘what if’ after the other. As you do, you become more anxious and even weep at the sad events and final ending of this path. This traumatizes you so much that you rush back to the room and shut that door. You are shaken. How could this possibly happen to you? Maybe it won’t because there are still 9 other doors.

So you creep over to ‘Worst case scenario door number 2’, open it and walk down its path. Again you play out all that could happen with each situation more horrible than the last and in a panic you rush back out that door and shut it as well. Your breathing is heavy and you are in a sweat. You are anything but relaxed and at peace. But will you stop there? No. There are now 8 more doors left, all tantalizing you with their possibilities of your supposed future. Will you leave the future to God? No, of course not, because the ‘not knowing’ part is killing you, so you take matters into your own hand and open the rest of the doors, one by one and experience in your mind all their ever increasing stories of gloom and destruction. At the end you are exhausted. Because of opening all those doors, you are now an anxiety ridden individual and no more the wiser in knowing what will actually become of you.

So, my question is, ‘why do you do this to yourself?’ The answer is simple to it all, ‘take your hand off the door knobs and when the future becomes the present He will take your hand, and lead you through a door, then walk you down the path that is allotted for you, and you will be OK. That is what He did for me. And that is what He will do for you because He promises this:

“I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Heb. 13:5).

So, to make a long story really short, after ten years of that prison, God opened up the gates and let me free. It happened all at once, almost miraculously, at least that is what it felt like. What I had was severe obstructive sleep apnea, where I stopped breathing 84 times in an hour for various lengths of time. With the shifting of age, my tongue ended up blocking my air way in sleep. I was going into REM sleep less than 1 % of the time and this is where true rest comes from and the rebuilding of the body and brain. I wasn’t getting rest and I also wasn’t getting enough oxygen. All this had thrown major systems in my body out of order, and these clicked back into place with sleep and oxygen.

With my new found strength and energy pouring into my body I remember thinking, This must be what it is like to wake up and find yourself ‘whole’ in heaven.” It was that amazingly unreal and drastic. And yet God had hid the very simple solution from us for about ten years. He knew what He was doing and was and is still good. God is never on trial, He was going somewhere with it for the building up of not only myself but of the body. There is blessing hidden in trials. When you put your hand in God’s and go through it together you get the blessing. If you pull away from Him, you are doubly hit, first with the trial and secondly now without the blessing. So run to Him no matter how hard it gets. God determines the start and finish of each trial specifically tailored to you.

If I could not control what happened to my body, I at least knew that I could control what happened in my mind because some of the biggest burdens that we carry are in our minds. So I had to learn how to pare down the burdens I was carrying since I was so weak. Here is how: Accept the process and the One who gave you the trial. It was helpful to recognize who gave the trial and that I could trust Him even if I didn’t know why He was being so severe with me. Part of the energy drain is fighting God.

Choose to be thankful. With everything seeming out of control, you still do have a lot of control and one of the things that you have control of is where you put your mind. Does your mind rest on what was taken away or what you still have? Hard as it is with everything being taken away, look around at what is still left and let your mind stay there – it helps, otherwise you’re living in constant grief at what was lost which can lead to deep sorrow, then despair.

“The name of the Lord is a strong tower; the righteous run to it and are safe” (Prov. 18:10).

“Giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph. 5:20).

Also, remember the source. Go farther than that, concentrate on what can never be taken away from you. There is a source that will never dry up that is always there for you. Even when all else is taken away God remains.

“The River of God is full of water” (Psa. 65:9).

Take away any extra burdens. You want to lift as much off yourself as possible so you can concentrate all your energy on the trial at hand.

“Come to Me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30).

God’s yoke is easy and His burden is light. Why is our burden so heavy? It is amazing how many burdens we actually put upon ourselves. So learn what you are to carry and what God is to carry.

Here are some general tips. God’s burden is always the future and the past since you can’t control either. God’s burden is everyone else out there since you can’t control them either. God’s burden is what you should be doing, you are under His yoke not your heavy one.

It is rather simple, each day you look up and take orders and get the grace to do them and leave all the rest into His hands.

How we view things. Once you’ve determined what God’s burden is, there are other ways we can add onto our burden without knowing. It is how we view things which can weigh us down or give us courage. Perspective is everything. If you view things from God’s perspective, your burden is light, from your own perspective, the burden can be very heavy, even crushing.

For example, how do you view yourself in this trial? Are you to be pitied, or praised? How do you view the trial? Is this a blessing or a curse? Is it an honor or a punishment? Is this trial an indication that you are loved or unloved? How do you view God? Is He kind or severe? Does He love you or is He ‘out to get you’? Is He good or is He being bad to you?

Let me give you an example from my situation that can be viewed from two different standpoints. Now first of all, for those of you who don’t know, that last trial I described was actually not the worst. The worst was yet to come when we found out our beautiful daughter had MS. So with that said here are the two perspectives:

“O, God is so harsh. We have gone from one trial to the next with little break on the mission field, then, instead of giving us a breather, God hammers us with a series of huge whammies that sends us reeling, first with a war, losing everything we loved, then losing my health for eight years of intense suffering in which my daughter took over my job and gave herself sacrificially for years. Then I was healed, for which I am very thankful, but six months later, we find out that my daughter had MS which was all the thanks she got from God after all her years of sacrifice. Now she has to suffer the rest of her life after having helped me so faithfully, and not gain the ideal life she had wanted, and will probably never marry or have kids and die young an invalid. How could God be so cruel?”

 or (same situation),

 “Isn’t God good? He put us through smaller trials and taught us how to grow with each one to gain a platform of His faithfulness on which to stand when the bigger trials came. He was so kind in doing this because we were not broadsided when we hit a huge one (which was the war and then my deteriorating health). And that was a gift in and of itself, because He taught me so much during the time when I was down, about who He is. I gained such precious jewels that I would not trade for the world, things I can now help others with.

Then when my daughter got MS, I was now ready to help her through her struggle by passing on what God had already taught me. She was able to get a handle on her trial and look to God in faith with joy. Isn’t God good to have put me through first so I would then be ready to help her when she needed it? And isn’t God good to give her something that would allow her to glorify Him in the highest sense, to gain what is really valuable and that won’t be taken from her? And, in His goodness, she actually did marry a wonderful young man.”

So which is it? Is God good, or is He cruel? Same situation, different perspectives.

How do you view your story? That there is a speeding car out of control with no driver in it and you’re in the backseat? Or, is there a driver in the car who knows where He is going? Did you get caught in the machinery, or was this all planned and you’re right on course? It all depends on how you look at it. You can relax if you know there is a good driver up in front.

The fact that you have the trial at all is really God’s burden not yours. All you need to know is that He is good and has your good in mind. You can say, “I don’t know why you are being so severe on me, but I know You and that is enough for me.

“The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and great in mercy, The Lord is good to all, And His tender mercies are over all His works” (Psa. 145:8).

“When we shall come home and enter to the possession of our Brother’s fair kingdom, and when our heads shall find the weight of the eternal crown of glory, and when we shall look back to pains and sufferings; then shall we see life and sorrow to be less than one step or stride from a prison to glory; and that our little inch of time-suffering is not worthy of our first night’s welcome home to heaven” (Samuel Rutherford).