Trials, Big or Little, Turn Our Faces to God

Not exactly beige, is it?

I’m sending you a flower this week. The bloom is new to my garden and a surprise to me. This one is called Wanda Capella. When I ordered the tubers online, the picture of Wanda showed a beige dinnerplate dahlia, but as you can plainly see Wanda Capella is Yella.

It’s not that I don’t like yellow dahlias, I do. But I have shades of yellow throughout the garden. I have some as yellow as a lemon and some as pale as an unripe tomato. So Wanda Capella’s appearance is a twist I didn’t expect.

Life is like that. Just when we think we’ve got the future figured out, a twist comes along that changes our plans. Some are inconvenient, some are tragic.

This week I dropped off a work order at a print shop I frequent and the owner tearfully told me she may have to close. Print orders have dwindled so much that she’s barely made the rent the past two years.  A twist in her life she didn’t expect.

I learned the doctors of a young boy for whom I have been praying are stopping his treatment because the therapy isn’t doing him any good.  His father says the cancer may claim him before Christmas.  He’s eleven.  His parents never expected to outlive their child.

A woman in our church whom I respect and admire left for a Bible study one evening and when she returned to her front door, that’s all she and her husband had left.  The house had burned in their absence.  Imagine yourself in her place.

Her reaction inspired me. She called her loss “stuff”, her experience the kind of trial that comes to each one of us, a season of inconvenience, a time to trust. I’m not certain I could have said the same.

 God’s word tells us He is with us through every trial. Romans 8:35 (NKJV) says: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”

He is there to walk with us through the trouble, to steady us to the other side of whatever we face. Romans 8:38,39 (NKJV): “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

God bless you in whatever trial you face this week. Whether it is as simple as a Wanda Capella flower the wrong color or a life changing crisis. He is there waiting for your hand.