Hope Heals In The Midst Of SufferingSample

"Forging hope in the midst of miraculous provision"

{JAY} I was in my final year of law school finishing up finals when Katherine’s stroke hit. I was allowed to graduate three weeks later, but had no time nor the desire to study for the bar exam. Over the months that turned to years, Katherine grew stronger and began to need less therapy. As we did more “life” outside the rehab hospital, I decided to study for the California bar.

Many of my law school friends were jumping into new jobs, while I had been steeped in my wife’s life-and-death conflicts. I think I resented the fact that my peers considered the bar exam to be the pinnacle of stress in their lives. I wish my most stressful encounter in life was a written test.

I ended up taking the exam, waited four months, then found out I’d failed. Amid swirling fears of the unknown, and how I would provide for my family, a question from the Lord kept bubbling to the surface of my mind: Will you trust Me?

It was then I decided that no matter what lay ahead, we could not let anything obscure our view of the God, who’s given us everything - even in the taking away. He is the same God, our loving father, who gives the one thing we need more than anything in the world: Himself.

I took the bar exam again the next year, waited another four more months, and found out I passed. I’ve never practiced law, but my legal schooling helped us form our non-profit ministry that currently reaches thousands around the world with the hope of Christ.

During our hospital stay, we received 2 million hits on our website, from people in the Middle East and Africa as well as England and Ireland, who continue to write to tell us that they are encouraged and helped.

When Joseph was finally freed from prison, Pharaoh recognized that the Spirit of God was in Him and he honored Joseph’s wisdom with the highest position, second only to himself. In that position, Joseph was given a wife and was able to carry out a plan that God had sovereignly given him to do: save multiple nations during a famine.

Joseph’s losses had been great, and his new life was not what he had pictured back when he was 17. The royal robe his father gave him was long destroyed, but he now wore fine Egyptian linens and a gold chain around his neck. Who could have ever imagined?