It will soon be a full year that my sweet wife Judy has struggled physically. Four hip replacement surgeries in eight weeks…due to a fall and to dislocations that couldn’t be put back in place. That meant five hospital stays (including a rehab hospital), four ambulance trips…all in two months…and then the long process of physical therapy to get Judy back to full mobility. When she got home, everything had to be relocated to one floor of our house, since she couldn’t climb steps.

Then Texas was hit with some of its coldest winter days ever. Water pipes froze and burst, flooding many homes…including that one floor we were living on. We were forced into a hotel stay for about six months while the house was being rebuilt and restored.

While there, it became obvious that the confusion and brain fog Judy was experiencing was something more than just the result of medications. Scans revealed that excess fluid on the brain was pressing in and causing a form of dementia. By God’s grace, we were led to a gifted brain surgeon who performed a procedure to take care of that problem. Like a miracle of God, Judy’s mental capacity returned to normal, and she is gaining more and more mobility.

Hard lessons for us…but powerful lessons.

I haven’t shared all this for sympathy or pity for Judy and me. At every turn, through every trial, we have seen God’s hand at work. I could tell you of miracle after miracle we observed even in the midst of very hard days. Again and again, we could declare, God is good!

One of the main lessons we have learned is that our Lord’s ways are so far above us.

Oh, how great are God’s riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his ways!

Romans 11:33 NLT

For instance, I prayed with the orthopedic surgeon from India who had to do those multiple surgeries. I could assure him that there were people in his hometown in India that were praying for him. After an extremely difficult procedure this gifted doctor expressed to me, “Someone was guiding me during that surgery.” I quickly agreed, put my arm around him, and told him I wanted to give thanks to the Lord for using this skilled physician to do His work. Peter said we should be ready to share with others the source of our hope. I could share with many of the medical personnel we met though this ordeal our thanks for them, but that our ultimate hope was found in Jesus.

Multiple times we have seen God bring people across our path and into our lives that we would have never met without the trials we were experiencing. A building contractor working on our home. Hotel people that have become like family, and others for whom we have prayed and shared our source of joy. Therapist, home health people, and many others. It has been amazing to see the Lord at work that way.

Here is something else we learned. We have known it theoretically. We have sung the hymn through the years:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus.

Look full in His wonderful face.

And the things of earth will grow strangely dim

In the light of His glory and grace.

You see, the more we understood that the Lord was bringing us new assignments, the less we thought about our “problems.” The more we used these unusual encounters to share our hope in a loving God, the more our afflictions diminished. We came to understand they were God’s opportunities to let His love and grace be reflected into the lives of people we would have never met were it not for our struggles.

The things we have faced this past year have come nowhere near what the Apostle Paul dealt with throughout his life. But we better understand his perspective about afflictions.

For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.

2 Corinthians 4:17-18 NLT

Hard lessons? Absolutely. Not ones I would want Judy…or me…to have to go through again. But we have a real sense of joy that God could use our “light afflictions” to bring glory to our Lord, and to allow us to share our hope with those He has brought into our lives.

…the things of earth will grow strangely dim

In the light of His glory and grace.

God’s best…