Affliction , livre ebook

© 1978, 1993 by Edith Schaeffer
Published by Baker Books a division of Baker Publishing Group P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287 www.bakerbooks.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-1498-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Scripture references not otherwise identified are based on the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture references identified NIV are from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV ®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” by Thomas Chisholm is © by Hope Publishing Company, Carol Stream, Illinois 60187. Used by permission.
The poem “Afraid? Of What?” is from The Triumph of John and Betty Stam by Geraldine Howard Taylor. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Overseas Missionary Fellowship.
Photo on back cover by Mike Habermann.
The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to the people who have so willingly shared some of the deep and most private and precious portions of their lives, in order to make available help that will be relevant to others in another geographic location or in another moment in history. Sharing in each other’s sufferings is a very delicate thing and that which brings “togetherness” into focus.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface

1 Why? Why? Why?
2 The Message from Stephen and Paul
3 A Crack in the Curtain
4 The Museum in Heaven: Rectangle A
5 The Museum’s Other Section: Rectangle B
6 Cracked Teapots
7 “Tribulation Worketh Patience”
8 The Refining Process
9 School for Comforters
10 Affliction and Evangelism Affliction and Guidance
11 Aborting Affliction
12 Practicing Contentment or What Comes Next?

Back Cover
Preface
E veryone has struggled with the question Why? in the midst of his own or someone else’s misery or difficulty. Affliction is a universal problem. Rich, poor, educated, uneducated, cultured, barbaric, city dwellers, farmers, bank presidents, street sweepers, musicians, coal miners, old, young, Eastern, Western all people of every tribe, nation, and language group have experienced and are experiencing and will experience some form of suffering, troubles, disappointments, or tragedy, and will continue to do so in their daily lives. Whether you know a person very well or have just struck up a conversation on a plane or bus, or in a doctor’s waiting room some portion of an exchange of communication is very often taken up with discussing each other’s “woes” or the troubles of the world at large.
Who has the answers to the often-heard questions: “How could a good God exist in the light of all the misery in the world?” or “If God created the world, then where did all the ugliness come from?”
This book is an attempt to look at the biblical explanations for the existence of affliction, as well as an attempt to deal with the great variety of purposes to be found in the blending of faith, long-suffering, love, and patience with persecution and affliction, as we go through examples from the real lives of modern and ancient people.
There is an inner excitement in the midst of stringency and hardship as a gymnast is preparing for the Olympics. Similarly, affliction with the goal ahead, understood, and vividly in sight is a different thing from the blind, dogged suffering of prisoners in a chain gang, being whipped, with no hope of anything beyond the present ugliness. The understanding comfort unfolded in these pages is a setting forth of the balance of some measure of the completeness of what God has given in His Word. Is a child of God meant to know pure joy because of a life of ease and the removal of all that might hinder a painless existence? When people try to live on the basis of erroneous ideas they have picked up about what happens (or is supposed to happen) concerning affliction when one becomes a Christian, it is apt to be like riding with a flat tire, trying to carry all the weight in one bag, reading by the light of one candle, or “seeing through dirty glasses.”
This book is not meant to be just theoretical. Its purpose is to give practical help for men and women, young and old, bedridden or active, in the daily problems of living in the midst of unexpected or expected, sudden or long awaited troubles and afflictions. An affliction can be physical, psychological, material, emotional, intellectual, or cultural. An affliction can be having too much or too little, having too many demands upon one or no feeling of being needed. An affliction can be a sudden shock or a daily, constant dragging on with no change. An affliction can be planned by some human being who wants to do us harm, or can apparently come with no explanation at all. An affliction can be that which turns our whole lives upside down and changes the course of our lives so completely that we find ourselves in another location, another house, even another country; or it can be seemingly so small and insignificant that we might feel that no one else would define it as “trouble” at all.
This book is not only to give some measure of fresh understanding, but some measure of comfort and some help in the practical area of how to go on in the next step of life. It is my prayer that the result will not only be something positive in the life of the reader, but that there will also be many results in the lives of people the reader will be helping with greater incentive and understanding and love. We need to constantly remember that we cannot wait until we have attained a place of sufficiency before we turn from our own needs to help another.
1
Why? Why? Why?
P hilip had often had his glass of apple juice and a muffin, along with his sister and the other children, as Claire-Lise, his mother, and the other ladies had tea or coffee before my Thursday-morning Bible class. Bright blue eyes full of response and sparkle, a shock of thick blond hair, and pink cheeks spoke of a robust, healthy little three-year-old with a zest for life. His five-year-old sister had been playing by his bedside during his seemingly minor illness croup when he choked, and within seconds his breathing stopped. “Mother, Mother. Philip has gone . . . .” Gwen understood instinctively that her brother was no longer in the room with her. His body was there, but Philip was out of her reach. How could it be? Impossible! Why?
The Lausanne Conservatoire of Music conjures up the picture of musicians of all ages coming, going, practicing on a diversity of instruments, having lessons, concentrating on corrections. There is such a variety of intensity, interest, pleasure, and earnestness in this atmosphere of music and culture. Anne-Françoise, the dear nine-year-old daughter of José Flores and his wife, Anne-Lise, was in the hall of the conservatoire one April afternoon in 1972, waiting downstairs for her mother to finish talking to the teacher. Suddenly a young madman (who had become violent after leaving a psychiatric hospital to spend a day at home) surged down the street, slashing people with a kitchen carving knife. Six adults were injured in the frightening seven minutes, and his last deed before being stopped was to push into the hall of the music building and devastatingly murder the little girl. A flash, a crash of a murderous knife, and she was suddenly absent from her body, separated from her family. How could it be? Impossible! Why?
Twenty-year-old David Koop, on a springtime climb in the mountains of New Hampshire, was hit by a huge falling rock, slipped from the steep mountainside, and in brief moments was no longer there as his body hung suspended from his companion seven hundred feet above the valley floor. A mere statistic for the summer? No. As each of the others, this boy of twenty was a beloved child of his parents, in this case Dr. and Mrs. C. Everett Koop. This great surgeon has saved the lives of countless children, operating on babies in great need, giving them years of life in place of the imminent deaths they were facing. David was also a son of the Living God, in active service for the Lord, and seemed to have so very much to do in the needed area of making truth known to his contemporaries who were searching in the dark. The Bible he left behind when he so suddenly was absent from his body, his family, and the others who needed him was marked in a way so that his family knew which was the last verse he had read before going on that climb. His Bible was open to verse 24 of the Book of Jude: “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.” God was able to keep him from physically falling. How could he fall? Impossible! Why?
I have just finished writing to the mother and father of a nineteen-year-old boy who is dying of a cancer which was arrested for a time and has now returned. Why didn’t the disease stay in remission? Why?
Why? The letter before that was to a young woman who had jumped from a window, trying to kill herself. Why did she only break her back and ankles? Why didn’t she die? Why?
John and Betty Stam had finished years of preparation in college and Bible school. God had brought them together to complement each other in a work which seemed to lie before them for years in China, where they had le