Hard Times

Throughout the summer, there has been people back home and people here that are going through incredibly hard times. It’s difficult when you feel like your life is at an all-time high and you are trying to sympathize with people who are going through so much. It becomes a test to see if you can bring together the right words at the right time to keep them encouraged. This past week has been the best week out here for me so far, and I’ve had great weeks, and it makes me feel horrible when I think of all the things that are constantly nagging at other people’s minds. This week, John Witte’s talk has helped to find the words I’ve been searching for.

He talked on diligence, mainly diligence in a job/career, or in your faith, but it has made me think of diligence through life itself. It’s a guarantee that we will go through hard times in our life, and through these God makes us wiser, stronger, and closer to Him. Sometimes we don’t know why things happen to us and we wonder why God takes away the things or the people that we love the most, but we need to have faith that He has reasons that we just cannot fathom. It takes true diligence to push through the valleys of our life and to just try to hike back up to another peak that just seems too far away. Timing has been impeccable for me, because I started to read Job about a week and a half ago, and the diligence that he shows is absolutely incredible.

Job is a story that people need to know, especially when there are hard times in one’s life. It’s been encouraging for me to read, and to try to relay the message and the faith that Job shows to people going through so much pain in their life. Job loses his livestock and servants, his body is ruined, and he loses his ten children. After losing all his possessions and his children, Job declares that, “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised” (Job 1:21). After Job’s body is destroyed, his wife says that Job should curse God and lose his integrity, and Job questions her, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10). It is so easy for us to give thanks to God for all the amazing things that happen to us and for His beautiful creation that surrounds us, it is much more difficult to thank him for the things we don’t understand. Although it’s not easy to thank Him for everything it is something everyone needs to try to do. When my family adopted a handicapped child from Guatemala, I constantly questioned God because I couldn’t love my new brother, I just didn’t know how. He couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk, and could barely see, and I didn’t know how to act around him, or how to hold him and feel something, or how to love him. And through this I have the best little brother in the world, he still can’t walk, talk, or see very well, but he’s the greatest kid in the world. He has taught my family more than anything or anyone else could, and I love him just as I love the rest of my family. He fits into the Nelson family perfectly, and I hate myself when I think of the doubts I had and the lack of emotion I had, because I love him more than anything now. God puts people in our lives for reasons, and he takes people out of our lives for reasons that we just can’t explain. We just need to learn how to thank Him for what happens and believe He has our best interests in mind through everything that takes place in our lives.

This summer has been an amazing learning experience, and I just hope, as a whole, the Calvin group continues to grow through the rest of the summer.