Trials

C. H. Spurgeon once said that a trial is not a trial if a person doesn't feel it. In other words, if a person could take a difficult situation, step back and analyze it, it would no longer be a trial. For the most part, it means very little to simply know that one is going through a trial. The person still feels it, and stating what it is merely intellectualizes it and does nothing for his or her emotions. So in a trial, one has a definite sense of the intellectual side and the emotional side. The intellectual is easily controlled and analyzed. The emotional is a cyclone.

Perhaps the most interesting part of a trial is the amount of worry even in cases of vast experience. For instance, no matter how many times a person experiences the providence and faithfulness of God, when a trial comes, he or she will simply break under the pressure into worrying. This is perhaps the most vivid example of human weakness. From my personal experience, I can relate to unnecessary worrying. In fact, I have spent many trials looking straight at it intellectually and trying to convince my emotions that worrying is illogical. If God has always been faithful, why do I doubt? It is completely absurd except to show human weakness and instability.

However, one of the best things in a trial is the fellowship of a brother or sister who has been through it before and experienced it all and can tell you about the weakness, the numbness, the waiting, the worrying, the crying, and...of course...the never-failing providence and faithfulness of God.

-8/7/08

*note 1/26/09

Perhaps I should somewhat correct my words and say that sometimes a person gets to a point where they cannot even intellectualize their state anymore, and it is not easily controlled and analyzed anymore.  A person's emotions get into such a cyclone, and the circumstances of life refuse to let that person even reach an intellectual stability.  In times like these, one must cling to that thread-string of faith that God is in control and He wants us to realize that we are frail human beings that cannot control even our minds at times.   But even through that, He has not let go of us; and He will not.  He will reconcile us to Himself once again.  His sovereignty in the Gospel is the only thing that will carry you through times like that.