Paul put it this way, “Trouble produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope. ” (Moffat Translation) and remember Paul wrote these words not from some ivory tower…but rather he had been beaten in a dirty windowless jail cell. Remember his words in 2 Corinthians 11:24“Five times I received forty stripes save one, thirty was I beaten with rods. ”
My children are all grown now. Indeed, as a great grand father I can really look back a long way to remember when I was a young father and had to sometimes say “No” to a tear stained face.
“Daddy knows best” was the message I tried to communicate and I did certainly know better than my little ones who were still trying to adapt to this adventure called life.
Not that they always believed it. Actually, they seldom believed it…but that made it no less true.
So it is with my heavenly Father. He knows what is best and better than a billion times over. He sees a total picture. I see no more than a pixel or two.
It is why I pray “Thy will be done. ” It is why sometimes when I have sought to succeed where I was not sure I was right in the pursuit of a particular success I have prayed, “Lord, if I have made a bad choice…please let me fail. ” And thank God, and that is a prayer, He has answered what I call “another one of my failure prayers. ” And saved me from myself.
And then there are times when failure has come looking for me…the same that has happened to others…and a stumble became a fall that became a disaster that became a roaring success story.
Take out tragedy and triumph walked hand in hand to meet and greet Ludwig Van Beethoven.
As he conducted his famous Ninth Symphony, the audience stood and rocked the theater with their applause. This great musician, however, heard neither the musicnor the applause, because by this time in his life…he was completely stone deaf.
His deafness first made him bitter but then heroic and it came through in his music. Many of his musician friends found a new depth and intensity “there is triumph in his music that never was there before” said one musical critic.
When three year old Louie Braille blinded himself while boring holes with an awl in his father’s harness shop, it seemed a senseless tragedy.
However, because Braille was blind; for over one hundred years the blind have been able to read.
Helen Keller was born deaf, dumb and blind and yet was able to say when finally she overcame the impossible “I thank God for my handicaps, for through them I have found myself, my work and my God. ”
Once, two men in Charles Reade’s book “The Cloister and the Hearth” were shown walking through a troubled Europe .
One man continually turns to the other and says, “Courage my friend, the devil is dead. ”
A better verbal tonic might have been, “Courage my friend, God is alive. ”
That’s the gospel, my friends. It does not deny problems. It asserts faith.
It shouts “God is love. ” It comes to you in your darkest moment of doubt and says, “Come unto Me all ye that are weary and heaven laden and I will give you peace. ”
Yes, I know men kill but I know they also heal.
I know there is pain but there is also the pleasure of being comforted.
I know he put within us greed and graciousness…sin and sainthood…all kind of evil and all manner of good…and then He made man free.
And with that freedom I flew airplanes and then did aerobatic and flew hang gliders and that final act of courage and foolishness almost got me killed. It did paralyze my left arm and even after the paralysis left make it so it would never work quite the same way again. And yes fill me with an overwhelming gratitude that once paralyzed it worked again.
Pain, problem, fear and the recovery. What a trip and what I learned from that trip. Gratitude of the sort I could never have had any other way.
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TO WATCH NEIL WYRICK IN HIS ONE MAN DRAMAS (Presented to millions all around the world) (Ben Franiklin, Martin Luther, Charles Wesley and Abraham Lincoln (this
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