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Faith through the storm

Richard Maffeo

Black smoke swirled through the streets. A woman’s anguish echoed from flame-licked walls as her husband fell dead at her side. A soldier pulled his blood-stained sword from the man’s chest, and then thrust it into hers. Around the corner, soldiers ripped babies from their mothers’ arms and flung them against stone walls. Devastation swallowed Jerusalem as the Babylonian army ravaged its way through the city.

Later, as he surveyed the smouldering ruins, Jeremiah wrote, “How deserted lies the city, once so full of people! . . . Bitterly she weeps at night. . . . There is none to comfort her. . . . The roads to Zion mourn” (Lamentations 1:1-4).

With grief still sticking in his throat, the prophet then wrote what some might describe as ludicrous: “The Lord’s . . . compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23). Anyone looking over his shoulder would have roared: “Are you crazy! Look around you, Jeremiah! Where is God in all this misery?”

Good question. It is one which men and women across the centuries have asked as they moved from one horror to another. But was Jeremiah crazy? Or did he have something which I – and perhaps you – need?

When a drunk driver kills a beloved husband, when divorce destroys a family, when a five-year-old is gunned down in a drive-by shooting, does the temptation to rail against God nearly overwhelm us? Do we shake our fists in God’s face and accuse, “Where is your faithfulness?” Is it possible for an ordinary someone, like you and me, to face tragedy with Jeremiah-like confidence in God’s unchanging faithfulness?

Horatio Spafford thought so. Early in 1871, Spafford lost his only son to illness. Four months later, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed his business properties. Two years later, his wife and daughters booked passage on a ship bound for England. During the voyage, the vessel collided with another ship and sank. Spafford’s daughters were among those drowned. A few days later, he booked passage for England to join his wife. When the ship reached the vicinity of the accident, he stood on the deck and wrote these words which you might recognize:

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.”

For more than a century, millions of hurting Christians around the world have found comfort in these words born from the bowels of heartache.

Rick Maldonado’s son Nicky wasn’t even eight years old when cancer smothered his young life. And yet, through their two-year battle with cancer, chemotherapy and radiation, Rick’s confidence in the God who never fails grew with each test, each completed treatment, each setback. Today, three years after losing his son, Rick is making plans to serve God in a counselling ministry. How many hurting Christians will he touch with words of comfort born in the caverns of personal tragedy?

I don’t know how they did it. I don’t know how people like Jeremiah, Spafford and thousands of others gave themselves over to the God who never fails – when all the evidence shouted otherwise. I don’t know what their secret was, but I doubt theirs was a faith born overnight in a hospital room or the cabin of a steamship.

In my quarter-century walk with Christ, I have grown increasingly convinced that no one is immune to heartache. Rich and poor, blue-collar and executive, young and old – personal tragedy crosses everyone’s path at one time or another. Jeremiah and those like him survived its devastation because, long before spasms of grief swept across their lives, they had committed themselves to really knowing Christ “and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, becoming like Him in His death” (Philippians 3:10). Through soul-rending prayer and persistent study of God’s Word, their faith had matured beyond shallow “name-it-and-claim-it” religious slogans. Their confidence in a loving and merciful Father had sunk its roots deep into eternity’s soil and produced fruit.

I have a lot to learn from their example. That is why, in times like the present when my faith is not tested to its limits, I dare not take lightly Scripture’s warning: “If you have run with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses? If you stumble in safe country, how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan?” (Jeremiah 12:5)

Because an intimate relationship with God is nurtured through a knowledge of God’s Word (Romans 10:17), why would I want to spend more time in front of the television than I spend with the Scriptures? If Isaiah urged us to “seek the Lord while He may be found” (Isaiah 55:6), what sense does it make that I spend more time with the newspaper than in prayer? Men and women of God who possess overcoming faith understand there is no shortcut to the kind of spiritual maturity which is able to look at devastation and still remain convinced of God’s faithfulness. That level of seasoned faith is possible only by growing increasingly more like Christ, seeking Him daily in the pages of Scripture and listening for His voice in attentive prayer. Don’t wait for the flames to lick at the walls, don’t linger until the ship sinks or the diagnosis is read before seeking a closer walk with Him.

Richard Maffeo is a writer from San Diego, Calif.

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Last modified June 27, 2000.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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