Title: You'll Get through This
Author: Max Lucado
The message is the message you need: You'll get through this. It won't be painless. It won't be quick. But God will use this mess for good. Don't be foolish or naïve. But don't despair either. With God's help, you'll get through this. Yes! Deliverance is to the Bible what jazz music is to Mardi Gras: bold, brassy, and everywhere.
Sometimes our "pits" come in the form of a diagnosis or a traumatic injury. Joseph's came in the form of a cistern. Joseph was thrown into a hole and despised. Sometimes we are thrown into an unemployment line and forgotten, into a divorce and betrayed, into a bed and abused. Our life is reduced to one quest: to get out of the pit and never get hurt again. Pits have no easy exit. Joseph's story got worse before it got better. Abandonment led to enslavement, entrapment, and imprisonment. He was sucker-punched, sold out, mistreated. People made promises only to break them. If hurt is a swampland, then Joseph was sentenced to a life of hard labor in the everglades.
Yet, Joseph never gave up. He never became bitter. He never let anger metastasize into hatred. His heart never hardened. He not only survived; he thrived.
Joseph's life offers this lesson: in God's hands, intended evil becomes ultimate good. Life in the pit stinks, but it forces us to look upward. Someone from up there must come down here and give you a hand. God did for Joseph. In the right time, in the right way, He will do the same for you.
Max Lucado acknowledges the depth of sorrow and trouble in modern life and offers realistic hope in a faith in God, even when such hope is hard to find.
Max Lucado ministers at the Oak Hills Church in San Antonio, Texas, where he lives with his wife, Denalyn, and a sweet misbehaving mutt, Andy. More than 100 million readers have found comfort in his writings.
