A word of encouragement from a friend
I received this article from a good friend this week. My friend had this cut out and taped to her mirror for years and retyped it and passed it along to me. It has encouraged at least two people now! I hope it encourages you, too.
Where is the Good Life When We Suffer?
by Chuck Colson
"What happens to the good life when your world falls apart?"
This was the question my friend Richard Neuhaus asked when he critiqued "The Good Life" manuscript. "It all sounds just a little too rosy," he wrote. "Remember, even Mother Teresa had days of depression."
I made a few changes in the manuscript. Still the question haunted me, as if my friend was being prophetic. As it turned out, he was.
In February my oldest son, Wendell, was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. As with any parent, the worst thing I could imagine was a child in peril. Shaken, I asked God repeatedly to let it be me, not Wendell.
Surgeons took 10 hours to remove the spinal tumor, making it the longest day of my life. The waiting room grew increasingly oppressive as our family huddled together while other anguished families came and went. Wendell came through it well, but continues in chemo.
I was just adjusting to the shock of Wendell when my precious daughter Emily was diagnosed with melanoma. Soon we were back at the hospital waiting room: more anxiety, prayers and sleepless nights. Then in April, my wife, Patty, underwent major knee surgery. Yet more anxious hours in another waiting room.
As I've frequently written, no one gets through life unscathed. You have probably discovered, as I have, that when trouble comes, it seems to pile on. Exhausted from 2 years of writing "The Good Life," I found myself at times wrestling with the great deceiver. He attacks when we're weakest or when God is going to do something very important--like a book being released. There was an unpleasant situation with a disgruntled former employee, an unauthorized and in part embarrassing biography published, a vicious attack on me in the press. Though my prayer partners sustained me, I understood what Mother Teresa wrote about. God at times seemed distant.
I write now, however, with perspective. The self-pitying fog began to clear in June: I was reminded how God so often uses the suffering of believers for His redemptive purpose. As a visible public figure, how I would bear up under this would be an important witness--as it is with each of us dealing with affliction. When I came to terms with this, my confidence was renewed, and I even experienced glorious moments of God's sustaining grace.
In September, the clearest understanding came, not in a blinding revelation but in quiet reflection. I was standing alone on the deck of a friend's mountaintop home in North Carolina, looking over the spectacular Smoky Mountains rising out of the mist. I was moved, as I so often am, by the majesty of His creation. It is impossible not to know that God is THE Creator. As I have written in "The Good Life", there is no other rational explanation for reality. God cannnot not be. I remembered Michael Novak's comment, "If occasionally I raise my heart in prayer, it is to no God I can see or hear or feel." The great theologian, of course, didn't mean that he doubted the existence of God, but rather that God is God whether or not we experience His presence.
Many evangelicals believe you can know truth only when you experience it. Not so. Our feelings are irrelevant; God is not the creature of our emotions--God is the great I AM, who created me and in whose care rests my family and my family's destiny.
I've spent years writing apologetic books, but it struck me that day in North Carolina that I needn't make sense of the burdens I was given to bear or the despair I'd experienced. Who was I even to question? I must simply cling to the certain knowledge that God is--and that He has revealed Himself in His infallible Word.
"What happens to the good life when your world falls apart?"
This was the question my friend Richard Neuhaus asked when he critiqued "The Good Life" manuscript. "It all sounds just a little too rosy," he wrote. "Remember, even Mother Teresa had days of depression."
I made a few changes in the manuscript. Still the question haunted me, as if my friend was being prophetic. As it turned out, he was.
In February my oldest son, Wendell, was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer. As with any parent, the worst thing I could imagine was a child in peril. Shaken, I asked God repeatedly to let it be me, not Wendell.
Surgeons took 10 hours to remove the spinal tumor, making it the longest day of my life. The waiting room grew increasingly oppressive as our family huddled together while other anguished families came and went. Wendell came through it well, but continues in chemo.
I was just adjusting to the shock of Wendell when my precious daughter Emily was diagnosed with melanoma. Soon we were back at the hospital waiting room: more anxiety, prayers and sleepless nights. Then in April, my wife, Patty, underwent major knee surgery. Yet more anxious hours in another waiting room.
As I've frequently written, no one gets through life unscathed. You have probably discovered, as I have, that when trouble comes, it seems to pile on. Exhausted from 2 years of writing "The Good Life," I found myself at times wrestling with the great deceiver. He attacks when we're weakest or when God is going to do something very important--like a book being released. There was an unpleasant situation with a disgruntled former employee, an unauthorized and in part embarrassing biography published, a vicious attack on me in the press. Though my prayer partners sustained me, I understood what Mother Teresa wrote about. God at times seemed distant.
I write now, however, with perspective. The self-pitying fog began to clear in June: I was reminded how God so often uses the suffering of believers for His redemptive purpose. As a visible public figure, how I would bear up under this would be an important witness--as it is with each of us dealing with affliction. When I came to terms with this, my confidence was renewed, and I even experienced glorious moments of God's sustaining grace.
In September, the clearest understanding came, not in a blinding revelation but in quiet reflection. I was standing alone on the deck of a friend's mountaintop home in North Carolina, looking over the spectacular Smoky Mountains rising out of the mist. I was moved, as I so often am, by the majesty of His creation. It is impossible not to know that God is THE Creator. As I have written in "The Good Life", there is no other rational explanation for reality. God cannnot not be. I remembered Michael Novak's comment, "If occasionally I raise my heart in prayer, it is to no God I can see or hear or feel." The great theologian, of course, didn't mean that he doubted the existence of God, but rather that God is God whether or not we experience His presence.
Many evangelicals believe you can know truth only when you experience it. Not so. Our feelings are irrelevant; God is not the creature of our emotions--God is the great I AM, who created me and in whose care rests my family and my family's destiny.
I've spent years writing apologetic books, but it struck me that day in North Carolina that I needn't make sense of the burdens I was given to bear or the despair I'd experienced. Who was I even to question? I must simply cling to the certain knowledge that God is--and that He has revealed Himself in His infallible Word.
Attempting to explain our existence, the philosopher Descartes famously said 'cogito ergo sum'--I think, therefore I am. But the Christian, Neuhaus writes, says ''cogitur ergo sum'--I was thought, therefore I am. On this certainty I entrust my life and my family.
Labels: Charles Colson, Where is the Good Life When We Suffer?
posted by Paul A. Thompson at
9:53 AM
0 Comments
Links to this post
