"So what do you do when you're suffering? You read the book of Job. And it was so helpful, most specifically in relationship to the questions I was asking on my treadmill! At least I found him helpful for me. After losing all of his children (10 to be exact), he says, 'The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord' (Job 1:21). Now, you must admit, this is a shocking statement. We have just read the account of how the Chaldeans (evil men) and a great wind (natural disaster) had caused the death of his children. But Job attributes it directly to the hand of God. How can this be? Perhaps he has mis-spoken in his pain? The next verse answers our question, 'In all of this, Job did not sin nor charge God with wrong.' (Job. 1:22)...

And here I have a confession to make. I grew up in a strong Weslyan tradition.What I thought I should fear in a totally and completely sovereign God over all things was in actuality the very thing that the Bible gave as the ground of my hope. So I stopped saying 'God didn’t cause it, but can use it for good' not only because I now believed this slogan went beyond and against the Bible, but because I believe it undercut the very hope I wanted it to create! If I denied that God could have intervened to prevent my daughters birth defect, what hope would I have that He could now 'use' it for good, when I was simultaneously denying that He couldn’t prevent it from happening? I realized my reasoning was absurd. I was trying to relieve God of His sovereignty, and simultaneously stripping Him of the power I so desperately needed him to have in my hour of need."


This is from a sermon my cousin sent to me. So good.