Why me?

How can anything good come from this?

Will I ever return to “normal” life?

God, what do You want me to learn from this?

While you and I might not receive the answers to these questions during our lifetime, we must remember that, even without a specific “answer,” we can use our trials, difficulties, losses, broken dreams, unplanned changes, etc. with a firsthand understanding that others won’t have. By His grace and with His help, we can follow the Bible’s teaching in II Corinthians 1:3-4 (NIV): “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God.”

This doesn’t mean that we stop hurting. It means that we have a unique opportunity to reach out to others whose hurt mirrors our own or to those who are headed to a hurt we can help them to see before it takes them down into the same valley we had to travel, only because we understand—truly understand. Though none of us can say that this is the reason for our trial, we can almost always say that this is at least a small part of the reason He entrusted the trial to us—after all, God thought it was an important enough part of the reason to tell us about it in His Word!

I’m going to close with a great quotation I found last night, using it as a reminder that even though we don’t know why something happens, we can do our best to influence what happens because of it:

“Sometimes God redeems your story by surrounding you with people who need to hear your past so it doesn’t become their future.” ~Jon Acuff