Do you believe everything happens for a purpose? Everything? That is a question my wife and I had to struggle with intensely the dreadful night the doctors told us our six year old son had a tumor in his pelvis and they believed it to be an aggressive soft tissue bone cancer called Ewing’s sarcoma. I will never forget that moment. I am sure you have life experiences of your own which cause you to wrestle with whether there is a purpose to everything that happens.
This morning I came across an article on a popular Christian site called Desiringgod.org. John Piper wrote an article entitled “10 Resolutions for Mental Health”. Each of the resolutions struck a cord with me, especially number 10: He writes, “Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.”
As we walked through Zachary’s cancer treatment we had to work hard to see how our theoretical faith played a real life role in giving us comfort in the midst of the most difficult trial of our lives so far. The idea that God is good and loving, even in the midst of difficult life trials, was comforting to us. But it goes further. God is not only good in the midst of our trials, but we are firmly convinced that God is good and loving by giving us our trials.
God loves us so much that he cares about our eternal happiness more than our temporal happiness. The Lord is always working in our trials. He has a purpose. I think of the number of people who were encouraged and touched, the number of people who touched us, the number of people whose lives were changed forever by encountering our sweet, joy-filled, always-smiling, never-complaining son as he endured all the intense pains, difficulties, and struggles that go along with his treatment.
God is doing things, big things, good things with your trials. This brought us much comfort in the midst of the trial. We could rest knowing that every aspect of that difficulty, no matter how it turned out in the end, had a good purpose. What comfort to know that our God was involving us and our family in His grand plans to pour out His love on others, and in the process was intentionally loving us through the trials He was giving us. One day maybe we will get to see a more clear glimpse of how God used Zachary’s cancer to glorify himself by loving us and the world around us. Until that day, we trust.
Inspired Resolve 