A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Handford
Have you ever felt like your world had collapsed, and that God has forgotten you?
I remember a Sunday when the Rice family gathered at Mother’s and
Daddy’s house for dinner in Wheaton. My sister Grace and her husband Allen
were there with their two childn, a son David, four, and a daughter, Allana,
two. Allana was a sunny child, eager and responsive, and she was delighted to
play with all of her cousins that Sunday. She seemed to have a little streak of
willfulness: if you called her, she might not respond. She evidently was so
engrossed in whatever she was doing, she didn’t want to hear you.
But that Sunday, my sister Joanna and her husband Bill said to Walt and
me quietly, “We’re afraid Allana is deaf. She doesn’t seem to hear when she’s called.”
Fear clutched at my heart. Allana? Doomed to a life of silence? Oh, please, dear God, no!
But it was true. When her parents took her for testing, they learned she was profoundly deaf.
You can imagine the grief we all felt. Grace and Allan had committed their lives to serving God. Now
this!
“All my life,” Grace sobbed to our father, “I have felt God’s umbrella of protection and love
sheltering me. Now, suddenly, all that safety is gone. I feel like God has abandoned me. I feel guilty
for feeling that, but it’s the way I feel. Daddy, have you ever felt that?”
Now my father was a nationally-known evangelist and prolific writer, but he answered her
soberly and honestly. “Yes. The day the church burned in Dallas, I felt God had forsaken me. We’d
worked so long and so hard to build it, and all that labor was gone in smoke in a day. I felt God had
abandoned me.”
“Did you feel guilty for feeling that way?”
“No, because I remembered that King David felt that way, and he was ‘a man after God’s own
heart.’ Remember what David asked in Psalm 42?”
“ I will say to God my Rock,
‘Why have You forgotten me?
Why do I go mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?’ . . . .
They say to me all day long, ‘Where is your God?’ ”
“So what did you do?” Grace asked tearfully.
“What King David did—he comforted himself with the memories of other times when God had
rescued him.”
“Why are you cast down, O my soul?
And why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; For I shall yet praise Him,
The help of my countenance and my God.” Psalm 42:9-13
Did Walt and I ever feel like God had deserted us? Oh, yes. We had a prodigal “in the far
country” for seven years; anorther child abducted; a church building destroyed by a carpenter’s
carelessness; I had a diagnosis of breast cancer. But God showered grace on us in those times of terrible
darkness: the child came home to serve God; the child was released without harm; the church was
rebuilt, the cancer was healed. God’s dear presence and comfort in those dark nights have sanctified
those memories. Our scars bear witness to God’s unfailing grace and compassion.
Child of God, you do not need to fear the darkness. Your Heavenly Father will still be with you,
watching over you, protecting you, even when you do not feel His presence. One day soon you will
walk into the light, and know He was with you every step of that terible dark way.