What if one day we discover that God has wasted nothing in our life on Earth? What if we see that every agony was part of giving birth to an eternal joy?

SCRIVEN (1820—1886) wrote "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" after his fiancée drowned. George Matheson (1842—1906) wrote "O Love That Wilt Not Let Me Go" after his fiancée rejected him because he was going blind.

any faith that leaves us unprepared for suffering is a false faith that deserves to be abandoned. Genuine

God's ownership and sovereignty offer a life-changing and freeing perspective when the house is robbed (or burns to the ground), the car is totaled, the laptop computer is stolen . . . or the diagnosis is terminal cancer.

Why aren't you happy?" they tend to focus on their current circumstances. Happy people look to Someone so big that by his grace, even great difficulties provide opportunities for a deeper kind of happiness.

G. K. Chesterton (1874—1936) has been widely credited with saying, "Jesus promised His disciples three things—that they would be completely fearless, absurdly happy, and in constant trouble.

The Bible indicates that God will not permit anything to happen that he can't use to bring ultimate good to his people and to glorify himself. That's his promise. Therefore, even the most terrible evil his children endure would not be pointless.

There is a difference between tears of hope and tears of hopelessness." —Erwin Lutzer

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.

So do not fear the struggle; rather, embrace it. Embrace it in the knowledge that the Grand Weaver will take all of your struggles, questions, disappointments, and fears and use them to build your faith and increasingly make you into a man or woman who looks like Jesus Christ.

Let your devotional life be the beacon that guides you through the tough terrain you will face.

Thankfully, our disappointments matter to God, and He has a way of taking even some of the bitterest moments we go through and making them into something of great significance in our life. It's hard to understand it at the time. Not one of us wants that thread when it is being woven in. Not one of us says, 'I can hardly wait to see where this is going to fit.' We all say at that moment, 'This is not the pattern I want.