"As Christians we know that God’s sovereign hand draws a line that leads from suffering to meaning, from pain to purpose, from grief to good. There is no affliction that leads nowhere, no sorrow that is ultimately futile, senseless, or pointless." - Challies
"The vast majority of U.S. adults ascribe suffering at least partly to random chance, a new Pew Research survey found." - RNS
Reposted from Rooted Thinking.
In a recent article, I told my story of struggling with idolizing missions. After that surrender and spiritual blessing, God used my physical problems to redirect my ministry.
The Lord allowed me to recover enough to continue to serve in Cambodia. However, it was clear that I no longer have the physical ability to maintain an aggressive evangelistic ministry like I once did. Now I found that I had to tackle ministry one day at a time, because I could not schedule with much certainty.
God graciously worked in Pursat and allowed us to train a man for the ministry who took over the church in Pursat. We moved on to the northeastern remote province of Oddar Meanchey at the Thai border to see if the Lord would allow me to recover more and be able to pursue church planting there. Health limitations were too great for church planting, but the Lord allowed us to teach professed believers in the wider area that were in desperate need of foundational Bible teaching. No doubt some came to genuine saving faith through that ministry. It was a real disappointment not to be able to pursue church planting there, because the need was profound.
Reposted from Rooted Thinking.
I was hit with a virus, likely mosquito-borne that our Singaporean doctor in Phnom Penh could not identify. It gave me sustained high fevers for more than a week. The doctor sent lab results to Singapore to try to determine what this was. After ruling out major viruses, she admitted there are still many unidentified that cause the pain and fevers I had. I left the clinic for home, since I had already been a week in Phnom Penh, a six-hour drive away from my family in Pursat.
As time rolled by, the fevers were gone, but symptoms like nerve and joint pain, bad headaches, and extreme fatigue came in waves. I was very affected by noise and touch, the sensations ramping up my pain. We were in the middle of tremendous blessing in ministry, people coming to Christ and changing, a spiritual breakthrough. We had three potential church plants in motion. We were living our dream, as it were, church planting in Cambodia’s Folk Buddhist heartland.
Our lives had been fully committed to and engrossed in learning language and culture while doing evangelism and discipleship. Our team was aggressively proclaiming the Gospel in several areas. God was starting to work in hearts. We were full of joy in the midst of a life and ministry that presented serious challenges. My wife Jennifer had her own deep valley of health concerns after repeated parasitic infections, and my own strange set of symptoms was limiting my abilities.
"According to the left, humans are to blame for the spread of racism, COVID-19, Ida, and the disaster in Afghanistan. According to the right, those same problems can also be ascribed to humans (though normally different). . . . one thing we can all agree on is that our problems are human problems with natural causes." - TGC
"Most simply defined, it is the belief that determinism and free will are compatible. That is, it is possible to believe in both without contradiction." - Roger Olson
"The prayer of His people is one of the means He uses to bring things to pass in this world. So if you ask me whether prayer changes things, I answer with an unhesitating 'Yes!'" - Ligonier
"If Nick’s death was not a lapse in God’s sovereignty, it was also not a lapse in his goodness. If there was no moment in which God stopped being sovereign there is no moment in which he stopped being good—good toward us, good toward Nick, good according to his perfect wisdom. God can’t not be good." - Challies
