Charisma Magazine

Do you wonder why God has to make it so hard on you? Why doesn't He make you good without making you miserable in the meantime? Of course He could, but He does not choose to do so.

He wants you to grow a little at a time and not burst into instant maturity. This is what He has decided, and you can only adore His wisdom—even when you don't understand it.

I am awed by what suffering can produce. You and I are nothing without the cross. I agonize and cry when the cross is working within me, but when it is over I look back in admiration for what God has accomplished.

If you don’t deal with your emotional pain, it will deal with you and your loved ones. Pretending it doesn’t exist won’t help you get emotionally fit.

When a warning light comes on in a car, putting a piece of black tape over it won’t fix the car. When a car is broken, it needs to be taken to someone who knows how the car works and understands how to fix it.

For a long time, I pretended that my pain didn’t exist. I covered up my warning signs. My life did break down, and I was forced to face my feelings the night I came close to losing my life to a drug overdose.

Suddenly, I was thrown onto a road of reality. I had to face the fact that I was a drug-addicted, D-student, self-destructive teen-ager going nowhere in life.

The biblical Abigail had a tense relationship with her husband, but she practiced grace and wisdom, and transformed her situation.

As a mentor, counselor and minister's wife, I often hear desperately hurting women say: "You just don't understand. Things are not like they were back in your day." "You don't know the things we have to go through—single parenting, abusive relationships, substance-abusing partners, men who won't or can't take financial, emotional or spiritual leadership and responsibility for their families."

"Does the Bible even speak to our pain in any realistic terms?" They ask.

How do we know when we are making the right decisions in life? Start by listening to your heart, your head and the Holy Spirit. With these components combined, it puts us on the right path that God has for us rather than what we may think is best.

Anything worth having is worth waiting for, but walking out this truth can push us to the edge.

Another crazy-night schedule began as I sped to the local high school, where I was to pick up my son and daughter from after-school club meetings. I'd hand off his sack dinner, rush her to violin lessons, drop him back home, get her from lessons, take him to youth group, and then invent dinner for the rest of the family.

But halfway to school, a string of red tail lights lit up in front of me. I craned my neck to see a power crew working on a line, narrowing the road to one lane. I glanced at my watch and fumed. How dare they interrupt my tight schedule!