Student Testimony
THE SEMINARY OF SUFFERING As I write this, my two daughters are sick. My two precious girls have had seven surgeries and twelve “procedures.” Our family has spent more nights in the hospital than I can count. Each of my daughters take 840 pills per month and have two-to-three breathing treatments per day. Their lungs are deteriorating. And according to every scientific “opinion,” my daughters will live half as long as most. I discovered these hard realities after my first semester of seminary. Sadly, suffering is not unique to my family. There are unspoken hardships that every person experiences— some watch dwindling bank accounts, others watch as terminal diseases eat away at loved ones, others visit their loved ones in graveyards. In this fallen world, humanity is plagued with trial and tragedy. In the same way, all Christians experience trials. Charles Spurgeon said, “God had one Son without sin, but he never had a son without trial.” Trials will come. All kinds of trials. 26
Trials that persist and plague homes, that linger longer than we ever would have imagined. Trials that demand every ounce of energy we have to offer. Trials that silence dinner tables and car rides. Trials that leave you weeping in the stillness of the night. And one of the hardest parts of trials is that we never know which corner they are around. The question is not if trials are coming, but how we will respond when they do. I came to seminary to learn to study the Word of God, but God had also enrolled me in a different seminary— the seminary of suffering. A dear friend told me recently, “There’s something you learn in the trial that you can’t learn without it.” So, I’m learning to write these lessons down, first and foremost for my own soul; second for my daughters, that they might one day see the grace that this trial has been for my own soul; and third for anyone else who also may be suffering silently. The primary lesson I learned concerned the sovereignty of God.
