“Delivered In The Storm”

Originally Posted August 5, 2020

I often hear a wonderful phrase attributed to a great saint, a pope, or even someone you may know…. wow, what a great insight. Yet the key is that if it is a powerful and transforming truth, it originated with God. God is the source of all beauty and truth and love. All truth comes from God. It’s not St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas or Pope John Paul II’s truth…they didn’t come up with the truth…but, they were attuned to God’s truth and attentive to his word. Thank God for their holiness which enabled them to listen to the Lord. 

Recently, I stumbled on to a beautiful and powerful phrase attributed to Mother Theresa….” God will not save you from the storm, but will save you in the storm” …… a beautiful, powerful, insightful. I can think that phrase originated with Mother Theresa, but it originated with God. Since I saw that phrase from Mother Theresa, I noted similar ones in at least two other places:

• Speaking of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 (up to 1 million people died in 100 days) a religious sister said “ in Rwanda, humanity had descended to its lowest place, and I experienced fear like never before. God did not take away these fears, but he gave me the strength to go through them. And from this darkest place, I heard God. calling me to be a messenger of light and hope and to put goodness back on its throne.” (ref. God’s Word Among Us, Dec. 31,2019)
• Oswald Chambers, a Protestant evangelist who died in 1917, noted that “ an average view of the Christian life is that it means deliverance from trouble. It is deliverance in trouble, which is a very different thing. God does not give us overcoming life, he gives us life as we overcome…spend yourself spiritually and you get more strength.” (ref. “My Upmost For His Highest” by Oswald Chambers, Aug. 2^nd sharing)

I believe thousands (even millions) of Christians have come to understand this important truth. Many who have endured sickness and trials and death have seen, overtime, that the Lord was with them and preserved them and even brought them into a new holiness thru that trial. I’ve heard it said that “ I wouldn’t go thru that again for a million dollars….but I wouldn’t take a million dollars for that experience.”

This process begins early in life as a child must trust his mother when she puts him on the school bus for the first time… don’t worry, I’ll be right here when you come home… he still has to sit on that big bus by himself. In truth it won’t end until the final process of dying is over where we must ultimately trust God that he will be with us thru the final difficult hours… he will be there to comfort and console us and will not leave our side all the way into eternity.

Knowing that the Lord will be with us in our trials brings peace and joy and hope…. “Better one day in the house of the Lord than a thousand elsewhere” (Ps. 84:10) So, we will no doubt experience storms in the future, but we can be confident that the Lord will be with us and he will work it all for the good. And that is very good news.