1984 September/October issue Part 3

Letters

From a friend whose son, two and a half, had to have surgery for a cyst (always a worrisome sign). "The cyst was benign! We are so grateful! We set the Lord before us so we will not be shaken for the living of life. Our goal is not to be comfortable and have everything turn out fine but to be godly and make an impact on our dying world and its values......................... May God continue to refine your life message as 'he keeps you from willful sins as His servant; may they not rule over you.'     (Ps    19:13). Barrett  [my son] memorized Genesis 4:7, and as he faces temptation he says the verse. He is learning to make wise choices and to be obedient..... We have not spared the rod on him but it has really worked. He says 'the rod drives out my foolishness"'

That letter came on the same day that I was reading Hannah Whitall Smith's Everyday

Religion, soon to be reprinted by Revell under the title The Commonsense Teaching of the Bible. She quotes George MacDonald. His words illuminate what Barrett's mother wrote.
 
"Man has a claim on God, a divine claim for any pain, want, disappointment, or misery that will help to make him what he ought to be. He has a claim to be punished, and to be spared not one pang that may urge him toward repentance; yea, he has a claim to be compelled to repent; to be hedged in on every side, to have one after another of the strong, sharptoothed sheep-dogs of the Great Shepherd sent after him, to thwart him in any desire, foil him in any plan, frustrate him of any hope, until he come to see at length that nothing will ease his pain, nothing make life a thing worth having, but the presence of the living God within him; that nothing is good but the will of God; nothing noble enough for the desire of the heart of man but oneness with the eternal. For this God must make him yield his very being, that He himself may enter in and dwell with him."