DEALING WITH DISASTERS
TODAY’S MESSAGE OF
FROM
Discovering a BETTER LIFE MINISTRIES
(Stories of Real People, Real Events, Real Places)
Are dedicated to HELPING
PEOPLE FIND PEACE and HOPE
(John 10:10)
(April 29th, 2020)
DEALING WITH DISASTERS
Friend, some years ago I read a story about a seven-year-old boy who began his morning by falling off the school bus. In the process of doing this he suffered a cut to his head, and needed a couple of stitches.
Then, during a break between classes, he collided with another young boy. The result of that incident was a couple of loose teeth and a split lip.
Later that afternoon he fell and injured his arm, so Mr. Chapman, the school principal, thought they’d better get him home before anything else happened to him.
While driving him home, the principal noticed that the boy was clutching something in his hand and he asked, “What are you holding on to so tightly?”
In response to the principal’s question, the boy, with a smile from ear to ear, showed him a fifty-cent piece. “Where did you get it?” the man asked. In reply, the boy said he found it in the playground.
Then, with his face beaming with excitement and pleasure he added, “You know, Mr. Chapman, I’ve never found a fifty-cent piece before. This is my lucky day!”
When you stop to think about that response from the young boy, you can’t help but be impressed with his very positive attitude! -- During the course of that day he’d suffered a cut head, loose teeth, an injured arm, and a split lip---yet he could still say, “This is my lucky day!”
That’s the kind of stuff heroes are made of. -- Heroes are people who find reason to rejoice in the middle of their pain, who refuse to be victims, no matter what the circumstances may be.
They aren’t fools---they don’t deny the pain in their life; they just won’t let it be their lord and master. Such people refuse to gaze endlessly at their troubles, until excessive self-pity takes over and ruins them completely.
Friend, I’m not unaware that there is some suffering, so deep, so stark, for which words like mine are virtual obscenities. However I’m not addressing suffering of that magnitude in what I’ve just stated.
Now, just in case you have misunderstood what I’m trying to share with you today, I don’t want to make anybody feel guilty about feeling hurt and taking it seriously. I just wish I could say something that would enable those people to get up and go on, with their eyes on the good things of life as well as the evil, with their focus on the pleasant and joy-bringing aspects of life as well as the crushing experiences.
Perhaps you remember poor Miss Haversham in "Great Expectations?" You may recall that she was jilted on her wedding day and lived the rest of her life in her wedding dress in the very room where she was, when she received the sad news that her fiancé had deserted her. The clocks were stopped at that very hour and remained precisely as they were when the awful news came.
Friend, Miss Haversham’s life ended that day, years before her tragic death by fire finally came.
Then there’s the heroine’s father in "A Tale of Two Cities." After spending years in the dreaded Bastille Prison, he was brought to England and freedom. But late in the night they would often hear him do what he had been forced to do for years in the darkness of his Prison Cell, while repairing shoes and mumbling his prison number when someone spoke to him.
The reality is, he had never been freed---they only moved his body from France to England!
Friend, pain can crush and brutalize---it isn’t always strengthening or character building. But the kind of pain that most of us face---real and sharp and sometimes prolonged as it is---can be overcome.
In real life, people like Victor Frankl, who suffered terrible “medical experiments” under the Nazis in their evil camps, have taught us that it isn’t what happens to us that ultimately matters, but what we do with what happens to us.
Well, could we say that is a glib response on the part of Victor Frankl? – Hardly! You see, it’s amazing how often one comes across suffering of the horrendous kind only to discover that the sufferer is ablaze with cheerful stubbornness!
I’m sure you’ve seen the news coverage yourself---a refuge camp overrun with sickness and hunger, with death in every other hut. And then you see some smiling man or woman who looks all those challenges right in the eye and lives in spite of them, while rubbing shoulders with weeping, despairing, beaten people (and I have no criticism to make of those people), such a person remains unbowed.
Friend, we need such brave spirits to change this world we live in . . . or at least to change communities or individuals, if not the world. We need people who are realists---who acknowledge pain, their own included---but people who refuse to be intimidated into paralysis. Because out of these pained masses of people come the suffering, intelligent, realistic souls who won’t grovel.
In fact, all around the world, you do come across people who choose to live and die in these conditions so they can ease the burdens of other sufferers.
Perhaps you have read the book called “Children’s Prayers.” In it, one of the children surveyed the challenges and risks that a life of faith in God can bring and wrote God a note that said, “Dear God, count me in, your friend, Herbie.”
Things that I learned from
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Friend, it may be that even as you have been reading what I have shared with you today, you are still looking for a place where trouble can’t hurt you. If so, we would like to send you a small booklet that will help you to find such a place.
The booklet we are offering you is titled “WHERE TROUBLE CAN’T HURT YOU” and it won’t cost you anything. Just write and request your copy from Discovering A BETTER LIFE, P.O. Box 1540, Albany, Western Australia 6331.
Phone us on: (08) 98 418 418 Or E-mail your request to us at: abl-alb@omninet.net.au
“We could never learn to be brave and patient
If there were only joy in the world!”
Helen Keller (1880-1968)
Friend, thank you for taking the time to read what we feel privileged to have shared with you today. We hope you have been encouraged and blessed.
Ron Bainbridge
Co-ordinator of:
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