God’s Good Hand
This view of suffering is what led me to Christ. I was born in India and contracted polio at three months old. I endured numerous operations and was tormented throughout grade school for my disability, leaving me angry and bitter at God, doubting his very existence. I couldn’t understand how a loving God could let this happen.
But at age 16, I opened the Bible to John 9, where the disciples were wondering whose sin caused the blind man’s condition. Jesus explained that his blindness was unrelated to sin. His affliction was given so that “the works of God might be displayed in his life.”
That passage undid me. Just as God had a purpose in the blind man’s suffering, God showed me there was a purpose to my suffering too. Both were for the glory of God. My bitterness dissolved when I realized that the God of the universe had chosen me to display his glory.
While I saw God’s purpose in my contracting polio, I didn’t believe all of my trials were sent by him. Some ordeals felt like they came from Satan. But decades later I heard a sermon by John Piper that radically reoriented my understanding of God’s hand in our affliction.
He quoted Charles Spurgeon, who struggled with depression all of his life and died of gout and Bright’s disease at age 57. Spurgeon said, “It would be a very sharp and trying experience to me to think that I have an affliction which God never sent me, that the bitter cup was never filled by his hand, that my trials were never measured out by him, nor sent to me by his arrangement of their weight and quantity.”
Yours Too
God weighs every minute detail of my suffering. Not a hair falls from my head apart from his will. That assurance sustained me as I weathered the onset of post-polio syndrome and my husband’s abandonment. While I was brokenhearted at both, I knew that God would ultimately use them for my good and his glory.
I will never know all that God is doing in my trials, but I have seen that he has refined my character, drawn me closer to him and enabled me to minister to others through my afflictions. And it is my earnest prayer that through my suffering, the works of God are being displayed in my life.
My greatest joy is that my suffering has purpose. Yours does as well. To God be the glory.
