What is your initial reaction when hit with difficult circumstances? How are you typically wired to respond to trials in life? Do you grit your teeth and hold on until it’s over? Close your eyes and hope it passes quickly? Like Cher, do you wish you could turn back time?
Josie, the heroine in The Secret Place, often wishes for a “do-over.” The story, written pre-2020, was set to take place in the fall of 2020 along Oregon’s majestic McKenzie River. Then in came 2020 like Freddy Krueger. If ever a year needed a do-over, that was the one. Covid-19 changed life as we knew it. And to compound things for my little book, a state-wide outbreak of destructive wildfires destroyed numerous parts of Oregon, including many communities in the McKenzie river valley—on the exact same date and at the same place where my story was set.
So as the time to publish the book approached, my choices were to either edit the story to include all the harsh realities of 2020—which would have made for a horrific tale. I couldn’t do it, and nobody I knew wanted to read that. Or I could leave the story as originally written without the harsh realities actually taking place on the dates noted in the book, which would have meant skipping blithely through 2020 pretending as if a pandemic, riots, and devastating fires never happened. Which would have been a heartless display of indifference to all the people who suffered so much.
I couldn’t do that, either. So as the book was preparing to go to press, I bumped the story year back to 2019 (pre-covid & pre-fires), and adjusted all the dated backstory to match. And because of Libby’s secret journals, there was a LOT of dated backstory to edit.
If only we could do that in real life. Just edit the date and go back to a kinder time, back to the way things were before the world drastically changed. I wonder if people who lived through world wars longed for such a do-over? Why can’t we go back to the way life was before all this devastation? Why do we have to know firsthand about pain and hate and suffering and grief and PTSD and carry around permanent physical and emotional scars? Why do we have to find new ways to explain to our little ones about the harsh realities in our world?
Those who have lived through world wars must have come through changed, I’m sure they had no choice. Likewise, we can’t come through difficult times unchanged. We often have no control over them. But we can control the way we respond to them. We can always choose anger and put up resistance, or we can let trials make us stronger. We can allow God to purify our hearts, our goals, and our core values. We can choose to let pointless, temporal stuff burn off in the heat of the fiery trial and leave us packing light, determined, ready to follow him unhindered by useless weight and needless baggage from stuff in life that won’t be going into eternity with us. We can choose to focus on what matters in the bigger picture of God’s master plan. We can choose to let go of anything we worship or cling to that isn’t God.
How you achieve strength from trial is up to you. I am only as strong as my weakest moment, so the only hope for me is in knowing that I have been promised an eternal future free of pain, suffering, and strife, and that promise comes from the One who is faithful without fail, who by his mercy lives inside me, who kindly picks me up when I fall and who carries me when I am weak. One who is undaunted by evil and unshaken by destruction. One who sees and cares.
One who has a plan. A good, perfect, forever plan. And he is determined to see it through.
My hope is entirely in Christ, not in me, no way, thank God. I am weak, but his word says that when I am weak, he is strong.
…But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest on me. That is why, for the sake of Christ, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. 2 Corinthians 12:9-10
He will keep you strong to the end so that you will be free from all blame on the day when our Lord Jesus Christ returns. God will do this, for he is faithful to do what he says, and he has invited you into partnership with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. 1 Corinthians 1:8-9
His strength shows up in my weakness. When I am broken, when I am scared, when I am sick or faithless or shaken, he is steadfast, faithful, and strong.
This broken world is not going to last forever, and it is not our forever home. A glorious new earth is part of his master plan, and it’s coming soon. All sorrow and darkness will be no more. My hope is on the horizon. My job, my response to storms and trials is to keep my eyes on Jesus and point him out to those who can’t see beyond the haze rising from the rubble.
Camille Eide
Along The Banks 