Endurance for the Journey, Featured, Grief

And we know that God causes everything to work together
for the good of those who love God and
are called according to His purpose for them.
ROMANS 8:28 (NLT)

Nanci and I experienced many glimpses of God’s sovereign purposes for years before her cancer diagnosis. We saw that my becoming an insulin-dependent diabetic 35 years ago was God’s plan to increase my dependence on Him. And we saw 30 years ago, that a lawsuit by an abortion clinic for $8.2 million was His way of moving me from pastoring a church we love into a ministry that reaches further than we ever imagined.

God’s hands were not tied by our difficult situations. He took bad situations and used them for His glory and our highest good. His sovereign grace far outstripped our hardships.

If this were not true, anyone facing a terminal illness would have to believe they experienced bad luck, and that God is either not as powerful or not as loving as He claims to be. Parents who have lost a child would have to believe the death was a meaningless accident, and that it wouldn’t have happened if only the child hadn’t been at that place at that time, or if that man hadn’t been driving drunk, or if a thousand other circumstances had been different.

If onlys and what ifs can rule our lives and drive us crazy. Instead, embracing God’s higher purposes – even when invisible to us in painful and tragic events – affirms God’s greatness. This is not fatalism. It is trust in the character and promises of our faithful, all-wise God.

My friend, David O’Brien, told me, with his slurred and laboring voice, that God used cerebral palsy to deepen his dependence on Christ. Was he better off? He lived convinced that his 81 years of suffering were no cosmic accident or satanic victory, but a severe mercy from the good hand of almighty God.

Written with permission by Randy Alcorn
and Eternal Perspective Ministries.
http://www.epm.org/
Excerpts taken from Randy Alcorn’s Blog.
Please learn about Randy’s new booklet to
be released this summer, Grieving with Hope.
https://store.epm.org/future-products/

On the journey with you,
Jan & Dave Dravecky