I’ve been dealing with vertigo – wicked stuff! – and the fear that goes along with it.  Fill in the blank for yourself with the name of your trial, suffering, sin… “I have been dealing with _________ and it’s nasty.”  The Psalms teach us to grieve our circumstances first and talk to God in our fears.

The Pacers’ star point guard, Tyrese Haliburton, suffered a torn right Achilles tendon during Game 7 of the NBA Finals.  He underwent surgery but the injury is expected to sideline him for the entire 2025-2026 season.   Everyone’s Facebook posts said to him, “You Got This!”…”you’ll be healed soon and be back on the court.”  But wait, let’s look at it from his perspective.  For almost all of his 25 years he has played basketball and been “All World” on the court.  Now what?  The first thing to do is to lament his situation, then he can move on to working on his inner man while his outer self is healing.

But why does God let suffering and death hang around?  Does it have a purpose?  I know we have the ultimate hope of it being obliterated.  Revelation 21:4 speaks of a future where there will be no more pain or suffering. It states, “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

By the way, when you’re suffering, it is best to preach to yourself, DON’T listen to yourself.  Your own thoughts are not trustworthy.  Sing to yourself – try the hymn “Be Still My Soul”.  The first stanza says:

Be still, my soul! the Lord is on your side;
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain;
Leave to your God to order and provide;
In ev’ry change he faithful will remain.
Be still, my soul! your best, your heav’nly friend
Thru’ thorny ways leads to a joyful end.

I also remind myself that He has promised to be with me.  Go look up Isaiah 41:10 and 43:2.

Focus your attention on who God is, His character and His purposes.

Our brokenness/cracks aren’t just how light gets in to us in our misery and darkness it’s how light shines through us to other people.  2 Corinthians 1:3-4 says, The Father of mercies and God of all comfort, comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

Here’s a quote about Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel ~ ‘But the Lord doesn’t use pain only to awaken nonbelievers; he also uses it to beautify his beloved, blood-bought people. As a minister, Keller repeatedly got to witness the miracle of pain “[pulling] those who already believed into a deeper experience of God’s reality, love, and grace.” Why? Because the furnace of affliction is “one of the main ways we move from abstract knowledge about God to a personal encounter with him as a living reality.” We wish it weren’t so! But affliction is God’s well-trodden path to transformation…

“You don’t measure someone’s spiritual growth by the height that they seem to have attained, but by the distance they’ve had to travel and the obstacles they’ve had to overcome to arrive at where they are today.”  John Owen

“ Never be afraid of being a broken thing.  Wounds are what break open the soul to plant the seeds of a deeper growth.

The seed breaks to give us the wheat. The soil breaks to give us the crop, the sky breaks to give us the rain, the wheat breaks to give us the bread. And the bread breaks to give us the feast —no abundance without breaking.  There was once even an alabaster jar that broke to give Christ all the glory.”  Ann Voskamp

God does great things through the greatly wounded.  It’s like making a stained-glass window (only God knows the pattern).  You take plain rectangular shaped pieces of colored glass, cut and assemble the many fragments using lead or copper foil, and then solder the pieces together.  When God’s light shines through, it’s magnificent, beautiful and glorifying to God.  No, the cutting, soldering and change are not pleasant, and we can’t see the final artwork.  But we were made in the image of God, and are being transformed into Christlikeness.