Strength Through Adversity, by the late Ted Engstrom

Cripple a man, and you have Sir Walter Scott. Lock him in a prison cell, and you have John Bunyan.  Bury him in the snows of Valley Forge, and you have George Washington.  Raise him in abject poverty, and you have Abraham Lincoln.

Strike him down with infantile paralysis, and he becomes Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Burn him so severely in a schoolhouse fire that doctors say he’ll never walk again, and you have Glenn Cunningham, who set the world record in 1934 by running a mile in four minutes and six seconds.

Call him a slow learner, retarded, write him off as unable to be educated, and you have Albert Einstein.  Have him or her born black in a society filled with racial discrimination, and you have Booker T. Washington, Harriet Tubman, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver, and Martin Luther King.

We could add many others to that list. People like Corrie ten Boom, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose incarceration in a concentration camp or prison cell became their classroom.  Or Joni Eareckson Tada, whose wheelchair has become her platform for an amazing worldwide ministry. I could tell of others whose names you wouldn’t know, just as you could add names from your own life.  Each is proof of what Charles Spurgeon said: “The Lord gets His best soldiers out of the highlands of affliction.”

Remember – “in all things God works for good for those who love him.” But He does ask us to stay faithful and hopeful (“be thankful in all things”).

For especially in the tough times He is building into us supernatural strength, wisdom and courage (as long as we do not abandon the Journey).