adversity

"Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance." (James 1:2-3).

In 1832, French engineer Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps was traveling on the Mediterranean Sea. One of the passengers on the ship he was on came down with a contagious disease and the ship was quarantined. Lesseps became very frustrated. To help kill time, he read the memoirs of Charles le Pere, who had considered the feasibility of building a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.

In 1869, the Suez Canal was completed. It was constructed under the leadership of de Lesseps and followed the very design which he conceived and expanded thirty-seven years earlier during that quarantine.  The entire world has reaped the benefit of his design and work ever since.

In my own life and work, almost every major change for the good that I have made has been the result of a setback or crisis of some kind. Most of the things I write about have come out of my own struggles, setbacks, and failures - and my subsequent search for answers to these issues. I turned to writing in the first place over four decades ago when I felt God had put me on the shelf and forgotten I existed.  I never wanted to be a writer, but God has used my writing to help many others.

Be assured that God wants to use your trials, your failures, and your setbacks, too - not only to help you grow, but also so you will be able to help others who are going through the same or similar trials that you have gone through.

May we be encouraged to offer prayers of the kind that will allow us grace to be of use in His Hands

 

"Blessed be 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."  (2 Corinthians 1:3-4) 

-Dick Innes