Your testimony can touch others!
By our faith, the Holy Spirit helps us with our daily problems and in our praying. For we don’t even know what we should pray for as we should; but the Holy Spirit prays for us with such feeling that it cannot be expressed in words. And the Father, who knows all hearts, knows what the Spirit is saying as He pleads for us in harmony with God’s own will. And we know that all that happens to us is working for our good if we love God and are fitting into His plans.
Romans 8:26-28 (The Living Bible)
Today I want to share another excerpt from “Heaven Is Real” by Don Piper. See the introduction to the previous post for further explanation.
“A couple of years ago I preached in a warm, exciting church and the people responded. I saw joy and happiness etched in many faces. After the service, I went into the pastor’s study. An older couple came in right behind me, and the husband pushed a wheelchair. The man in the wheelchair was obviously their son.‘Our son tried to kill himself. He was miserable and depressed about his life. Several years ago, he shot himself in the head.’
As I stared at the son, I judged his age to be about thirty. All these years you’ve been in a wheelchair, I thought, because of a terrible tragic mistake you made.The young man’s mental faculties hadn’t been affected, although he wasn’t very verbal.
Finally the father said, ‘Our son has a question. He was miserable for years, but now he is able to see life differently. Even in this condition, he knows life is worth living. Consequently he wants to know how he can take his circumstances and intentionally help somebody else.’ The question shocked me but I realized that the son had moved beyond remorse or shame and wanted his life to count for something.
I made several suggestions, but my first and most important one was this: ‘You need to chronicle your story. Put in writing what happened to you. After you’ve done that, find people that you trust and share the story with them. Listen to their response. You’ll be surprised how your testimony can touch others. What if you wrote your story and it saved a life? Or perhaps many lives?’
Part of the reason I share this story is because of the parents. Whatever dreams they had for their son’s life and his future are gone forever. But even in the midst of that, they exuded a quiet joy and inner peace. My assuption is that in the years since their son’s attempt on his own life, they had fought the battles of disappointment and despair and had come to rely on spiritual resources they might never have realized. Joy isn’t an absence of problems or having nothing hard in life. They proved that. Joy – true inner, Godly joy – is the result of knowing the circumstances and still being able to say, ‘It is well with my soul.’”
December 16 2008 04:31 pm | Bible and Christianity and Church and Faith and Family and God and Grace and Hope and Inspirational and Jesus and Life and Love and Mercy and Opinion and People and Personal and Philosophy and Quotes and Religion and Spiritual and Theology and Thoughts
