Encountering God’s Love in Suffering & SicknessSample

“God’s love is personal”

Being public about my cancer, I often have people admonish me for calling it my cancer or speaking so frankly about my battle with cancer. As if speaking the language of my disease is somehow making it an ongoing reality. How limited would God be if my honesty about my disease was His limitation to cure it? That would be an impotent God I would really like little to do with. But the God I know, the sovereign God of the Bible, knows well my story of suffering and offers Himself at every turn. If the honesty with which I tell my story were the limitation of His strength, well, I would be utterly screwed. But imagine if He were intimately involved in my story, which He is. Imagine if he showed Himself in my hard, which He did, and what if the hard of my story is the beautiful redemption of my today? Could suffering then take on a different hue? Could the coloring of the hard not be so dark, so hateful and gloomy? The well-meaning emails that admonish the way I speak about my story cause me to wonder at the depth of grace that can be understood without the presence of God in the midst of our suffering. If our hard is the absence of a good God, then how can anyone walk in faith?

* Your story is a good story. In the grief, pain, and hard, the Author has a plan. It may feel like a desperate breaking of your very heart, but suffering is not the absence of God or good. In our culture, the goal often seems to be winning, being the best, most beautiful, most successful, but what if that isn't the good story? How has suffering made your story richer? How has it shaped your story?