“Consider it pure joy when you experience trials of many kinds,” the Bible instructs Christians in James chapter one.
Say what?
During an interview with the Preacher and me on the Christian television program 100 Huntley Street, our host, Jim Cantelon, asked a telling question.
We were discussing West Nile Diary, my book about my husband’s battle with West Nile Neurological Disease. He spent six months in care, the last five at Regina’s Wascana Rehab centre, working with therapists to restore what he’d lost. Almost everything, it seemed.
West Nile paralyzed him in three limbs. He had constant pain and nausea. Meningoencephalitis had scrambled his brain. Severe depression plunged him deeply into what he called “a gray fog.”
A pocket-sized room in the attached hostel became my home – close enough to support, encourage and wherever possible, help with my husband’s care.
Removed from home and friends, we had no idea what lay ahead. Yet never before nor since have I understood so well the opening statement in Charles Dickens’ classic Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.”
I longed to have my husband’s health restored. I was eager to resume our former, more comfortable life. Yet in the book I’d mentioned that I felt conflicted about putting the worst of times behind us. “Why?” Jim wanted to know.
I explained that our difficult experience had also ushered into our lives unique and precious things. Mostly, it proved our deep faith in God as more than a mental exercise. I dreaded returning to placid. To taking God for granted. To an easy life that required little gutsy faith.
The crisis passed. Eventually life returned, if not to placidity, to a measure of predictability that doesn’t demand the utter dependence on God we needed in those worst of times.
A century or so ago, Charles Haddon Spurgeon, referred to by many theologians as “the prince of preachers,” endured frequent periods of deep depression. He called it a “shapeless, indefinable, yet all-beclouding hopelessness,” one that that could not be reasoned with; as difficult to battle as “fighting with mist.”
Eventually, Spurgeon realized that in his own worst times he also experienced the best of faith and the best of God. He too, “looked back to times of trial with a kind of longing, not to have them return, but to feel the strength of God as I have felt it then, to feel the power of faith, as I have felt it then, to hang upon God’s powerful arm as I hung upon it then, and to see God at work as I saw him then.”
Trouble is the exam for which our faith studies. A pass is proved by an extraordinary awareness of Christ’s presence – sometimes not realized until later. And that brings both peace and joy.
Develop your faith in the best of times, for in the worst, it will be the spoon with which God feeds you.
