The Unexpected Road of Suffering

On April 20, 2013, I was told by my loving husband of 15 years that he was very unhappy with his whole life and he wanted to move somewhere else to find himself without me. He said he had been thinking about it for awhile. Dumbstruck, I could not even speak. What did you say was all I could muster. He explained it again. What do you do when your whole world feels like it is crumbling. You grasp at anything. So, I said. You promised? How can you be saying this. Then, he says, I don't want a divorce. Now, I am really spinning. This was four months ago and I have figured out my husband is having a mid life crisis. The scary part is there is nothing I can do to fix this. I have tried. The cup has been given to me. This does not surprise God. This is my road of suffering. It has been the most painful thing I have ever been through. It is like my husband is gone. Left is a shell. He makes no sense right now. He is totally irrational. I can't even talk with him. The most scary thing is that from what I have read on the internet, it seems that most of the time it ends badly. Fifteen years gone. It has been brutal. Excruciatingly painful. My heart has been completely broken. I pray to God my Father. Please heal my shattered heart. The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it? (John 18:11) This was a greater thing to say and do than to calm the seas or raise the dead. Prophets and apostles could work wondrous miracles, but they could not always do and suffer the will of God. To do and suffer God's will is still the highest form of faith, the most sublime Christian achievement. To have the bright aspirations of a young life forever blasted; to bear a daily burden never congenial and to see no relief; to be pinched by poverty when you only desire a competency for the good and comfort of loved ones; to be fettered by some incurable physical disability; to be stripped bare of loved ones until you stand alone to meet the shocks of life--to be able to say in such a school of discipline, "The cup which my Father has given me, shall I not drink it?'--this is faith at its highest and spiritual success at the crowning point. Great faith is exhibited not so much in ability to do as to suffer. --Dr. Charles Parkhurst To have a sympathizing God we must have a suffering Saviour, and there is no true fellow-feeling with another save in the heart of him who has been afflicted like him. We cannot do good to others save at a cost to ourselves, and our afflictions are the price we pay for our ability to sympathize. He who would be a helper, must first be a sufferer. He who would be a saviour must somewhere and somehow have been upon a cross; and we cannot have the highest happiness of life in succoring others without tasting the cup which Jesus drank, and submitting to the baptism wherewith He was baptized. The most comforting of David's psalms were pressed out by suffering; and if Paul had not had his thorn in the flesh we had missed much of that tenderness which quivers in so many of his letters. The present circumstance, which presses so hard against you (if surrendered to Christ), is the best shaped tool in the Father's hand to chisel you for eternity. Trust Him, then. Do not push away the instrument lest you lose its work. Strange and difficult indeed We may find it, But the blessing that we need Is behind it. The school of suffering graduates rare scholars.