2 results for tag: trials

Contentment With Appreciation – Stuart Segall

Lost a lot of people in 2024, didn’t we? Lots of folks are struggling with real and debilitating health issues. Health and loss, part of the ongoing struggles of our lives. How do we deal with them? Writing to a German friend on his sixty-fourth birthday, ten years after his paralytic stroke, Walt Whitman reflects on what the limitations of living in a disabled body have taught him about the meaning of a full life: "From today I enter upon my 64th year. The paralysis that first affected me nearly ten years ago, has since remain’d, with varying course — seems to have settled quietly down, and will probably continue. I easily tire, am ...

“What is God teaching me?” – Brad Jersak

"What is God teaching me in this?" I hear this question frequently, most often through the trials and tragedies of life. When something goes wrong and life grinds our nose in the dust, we might wonder what lesson we're to learn. It's almost as if once you learn the lesson, you can move forward. Honestly, while the question is an expression of genuine humility, I think the question itself smuggles in extra painful assumptions that we would do well to discard. IF we think that God imparts wisdom through any circumstance, no problem. But if we view our painful circumstances and afflictions as a lesson sent by God, then God becomes the first cause of ...