It is an error – one which I so often excuse in myself – to believe that our uncontrolled emotional outbursts are a natural reaction to events around us or within us, a justifiable response to Tough Times that beset us and oppress us without our bidding and outside our control.\r\n\r\nBut this is not an appropriate Christian response to Tough Times. F D Maurice spoke about it this way:\r\n\r\n“God has brought us into this time; He, and not ourselves or some dark demon. If we are not fit to cope with that which He has prepared for us, we should have been utterly unfit for any condition that we imagine for ourselves.\r\n\r\n In this time we are to live and wrestle, and in no other.\r\n\r\n Let us humbly, tremblingly, look at it, and we shall not wish that the sun could go back its ten degrees, or that we could go back with it.\r\n If easy times are departed, it is that the difficult times may make us more in earnest: that they may teach us not to depend upon ourselves.\r\n If easy belief is impossible, it is that we may learn what belief is,\r\n and in whom it is to be placed.”\r\n
And so in the words of the Teacher:\r\n“Whosoever puts his trust in the Lord shall be safe”\r\nProverbs 29:25