Good Friday’s Suffering
Christ did not come to do away with suffering. He did not come to explain it; He came to fill it with His presence. –Paul Claude
Recycling Tragedy
An artist went to visit a dear friend. When he arrived, she was weeping. He asked why. She showed him a handkerchief of exquisite beauty that had great sentimental value, which has been ruined by a drop of indelible ink.
The artist asked her to let him have the handkerchief, which he returned to her by mail several days later. When she opened the package, she could hardly believe her eyes. The artist, using the inkblot as a base, had drawn on the handkerchief a design of great beauty with India ink. Now it was more beautiful and more valuable than ever.
Sometimes the tragedies that break our hearts can become the basis for a more beautiful design in our lives. Be patient with the hurts over which you have no control. They may become a source of healing, help, and beauty. –Thomas Lane Butts
Didn’t You Know I Would Come
Rufus Jones lost a son of eleven years who was all the world to him. He wrote many years later about the experience, concluding with this luminous parable of how his own heart was opened to God’s love:
“When my sorrow was at its most acute, I was walking along a great city highway, when suddenly I saw a little child come out of a great gate, which swung to and fastened behind her. She wanted to go to her home behind the gate, but it would not open. She pounded in vain with her little fist. She rattled the gate, but it would not open. Then she wailed as though her heart would break. The cry brought the mother. She caught the child in her arms and kissed away the tears. ‘Didn’t you know I would come? It’s all right now.’ All of a sudden I saw with my spirit that there was love behind my shut gate.”
If you suffer with God, you will find love behind your shut gate, a love that can lead you through the gate to be at home with all the children of God.
Praise and Suffering
Six years ago, I visited a church in Connecticut. In the middle of the eucharistic liturgy, when the whole congregation was kneeling and singing the “Alleluia,” I saw a woman near me with her hands lifted in praise. The thing was, those hands were terribly twisted and gnarled, and she has a paid of crutches near her. “Dear Christ,” I thought, “what makes Christians sing ‘Alleluia’?” Clearly there was something besides self-interest welling up from that woman in the act of praise.
The Gift of Trouble
The ability to get into trouble and the ability to get out of trouble are seldom present in the same person.
Failure and Perseverance
When he was seven years old, his family was forced out of their home on a legal technicality, and he had to work to help support them. At age nine, his mother died. At twenty-two, he lost his job as a store clerk. He wanted to go to law school, but his education wasn’t good enough. At twenty-three, he went into debt to become a partner in a small store. At twenty-six, his business partner died, leaving him a huge debt that took years to repay. At twenty-eight, after courting a girl for four years, he asked her to marry him. She said no. At thirty-seven, on his third try, he was elected to Congress, but two years later, he failed to be reelected. At forty-one, his four-year-old son died. At forty-five, he ran for the Senate and lost. At forty-seven, he failed as the vice-presidential candidate. At forty-nine, he ran for the Senate again and lost. At fifty-one, he was elected president of the United States. His name was Abraham Lincoln, a man many consider the greatest leader the country ever had. Some people get all the breaks!
The Highest of Joys
The highest of joy to the Christian almost always comes through suffering. No flower can bloom in paradise which is not transplanted from Gethsemane. –Ian MacLaren
How You Can Tell It’s Going to Be a Rotten Day
- You see a “60 Minutes” news team in your office.
- You call Suicide Prevention and they put you on hold.
- You turn on the news and they’re showing emergency routes out of the city.
- Your twin sister forgot your birthday.
- Your car horn goes off accidentally and remains stick as you follow a group of Hell’s Angels on the freeway.
- Your boss tells you not to bother to take off your coat.
- Your income tax check bounces.
- You put both contact lenses in the same eye.
Change of Habit
With me, a change of trouble is as good as a vacation. –David Lloyd George
Against the Wind
Remember, if everything is coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane. When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.
No Inferiority
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. –Eleanor Roosevelt
Polishing Trials
The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials. –Chinese proverb.
Suffering: Overcoming and Achieving
Some of the world’s greatest men and women have been saddled with disabilities and adversities but have managed to overcome them. Cripple him, and you have a Sir Walter Scott. Lock him in prison, and you have a John Bunyan. Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have a George Washington. Raise him in abject poverty, and you have an Abraham Lincoln. Subject him to bitter religious prejudice, and you have a Benjamin Disraeli. Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes a Franklin D. Roosevelt. Burn him so severely in a schoolhouse fire that the doctors say he will never walk again, and you have a Glenn Cunningham, who set a world’s record in 1934 for running a mile in 4 minutes, 6.7 seconds. Deafen a genius composer, and you have a Ludwig van Beethoven. Have him or her born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have a Booker T. Washington, a Harriet Tubman, a Marian Anderson, or a George Washington Carver. Make him the first child to survive in a poor Italian family of eighteen children, and you have an Enrico Caruso. Have him born of parents who survived a Nazi concentration camp, paralyze him from the waist down when he is four, and you have an incomparable concert violinist, Itzhak Perlman. Call him a slow learner, “retarded,” and write him off as ineducable, and you have an Albert Einstein.
The Positive Fruit of Tension
Theodore E. Steinway, president of Steinway and Sons, noted: “In one of our concert grand pianos, 243 taut strings exert a pull of 40,000 pounds on an iron frame. It is proof that out of great tension may come great harmony.”
Final Inspection
God will look you over, not for medals or degrees, but for scars. –Edward Sheldon
A Struggle
A man confined to bed because of a lingering illness had on his sunlit windowsill a cocoon of a beautiful species of butterfly. As nature took its course, the butterfly began its struggle to emerge from the cocoon. But it was a long, hard battle. As the hours went by, the struggling insect seemed to make almost no progress. Finally, the human observer, thinking that “the powers that be” had erred, took a pair of scissors and snipped the opening larger. The butterfly crawled out, but that’s all it ever did—crawl. The pressure of the struggle was intended to push colorful, life-giving juices back into the wings, but the man in his supposed mercy prevented this. The insect never was anything but a stunted abortion, and instead of flying on rainbow wings above the beautiful gardens, it was condemned to spend its brief life crawling in the dust. That gives me the idea that God knows what He is doing. It’s a fact that you can depend on Him—even when it seems the struggle is hard and meaningless.
Motivation to Push Us
The Lord gives us friends to push us to our potential—and enemies to push us beyond it. –Jim Vorsas
Light and Shadow
Never fear shadows. That just means a light’s shining somewhere nearby.
Suffering: How Bad Was It?
A woman described a nerve-wracking ordeal: “It was like being trapped for four hours in a stuck elevator with a team of Jehovah’s Witnesses.”