G'morning.

Imagine a time you thought you'd hit bottom--an event or injury you couldn’t endure. Life has a way of somehow (over time?) turning it into a blessing. This is what happened for Paul and Diane in MY SILENT HEART. In what circumstances has this happened for you? If it hasn’t happened, how do you imagine it might play out?

Josh Lockwood

This would have to be when I went through my divorce. I was still on active duty, had orders to go aboard an aircraft carrier, and knew that … for all practical purposes … I’d lost my daughters from that marriage. Even as a Navy Senior Chief Petty Officer I cried myself to sleep night after night steaming around out there in the Gulf of Tonkin. The blessing part? Years later my daughters told me they’d found the box of letters I’d written, the gifts I’d sent, that their mother hid from them trying to make me look bad, and they finally realized it took two to tango.

Judy Jarvie

Several years ago my family felt thwarted in lots of directions – loss of family members in close succession and the death of my husband’s father on Christmas Eve, encountering obstacles on the process to adopting a child. Happening right at the holiday season when it felt like everyone else in the world was celebrating and enjoying life, this has helped me think of others less fortunate at happy times.

Loree Lough

Like most of us, I can’t single out just one time when I’ve felt I couldn’t endure, believed I simply couldn’t go on. Illnesses and accidents have threatened to choke the life from loved ones, and from me, too. Then, those series of everyday stuff that hit, one upon the other: A bum knee. A loose filling. Burnt toast. And the not-so-everyday stuff, like finding out the company you work for is going out of business; being forced to uproot the family and move half-way across country to secure a new job. Friends die. Children leave home. A storm sends a tree crashing through your roof. Fire destroys every photo, each saved crayon-sketch, all scraps of precious memorabilia it’s taken a lifetime to accumulate.

Amid crises like those, I used to pray “Please God, give me the patience to get through it” until an elderly lady from my church heard my plea. “Never, never, NEVER pray for patience,” she said, “because the only way to earn patience is through trials and tribulations!” She gave me a warm, grandmotherly hug and added, “Pray, instead, for endurance.”

‘Snuff said.

Meg Allison

I was seven months pregnant with our second child and my husband’s plant shut down, putting him out of work. I was terrified. But over the next three years we made our way through it all without much suffering, thanks to benefits we received and help from our church and family. Eventually he wound up with a great job that brought us to where we now live. We have been truly blessed. It wasn’t always an easy journey, but I know we’re stronger in many ways because of it.

Denise Patrick

I had a professor in college accuse me of plagiarizing a paper for a class.  Having been writing for years, this was very much a low point in my life.  Not to mention, I could have been kicked out of my graduate program and my life would have taken a sudden drastic turn for the worse.  Thankfully, I was able to turn to prayer for comfort and strength.  I can now look back on the incident and realize it gave me confidence in my writing abilities.  After all, the professor assumed I had copied the paper from a professional journal and when I proved that I had, in fact, written it, he gave me an 'A' in the class.

Margaret Callaghan

Reaching rock bottom is cathartic: you have to be brutally honest with yourself, and work out what really counts. Most relationships have their ups and downs, but when things go seriously wrong, you need to think long term: e.g. if things don’t improve, can I continue to live with this level of pain or do I need to grab hold of the things over which I have some control? Making even a small decision and acting upon it is a positive step forward.

JoAnn Carter

I was once engaged to a wonderful fellow. There was no reason for me to be hesitant to marry him, but I was. I kept asking him, “Do you think this is God’s will for us?”  Finally one day he said, “Maybe we should wait.”

I remember going home and hand-in-hand we told my mom. He left my house that day and never looked back. He never called, wrote, or tired to contact me-- it was so final.

I had no idea what God had in mind, but I figured men for me at that time was out of the question.

A few months later, my sister an her fiancé called my mom from the church they were attending and asked if she could bring someone home with her for lunch. (At the time, I worked as a nurse at the hospital and only had off every other weekend.) I knew who she meant. For weeks she had been trying to get me to go to her church to meet this guy.  I told her I wasn’t going to her church to meet some man. So instead she brought him home.

Today, that man is my husband.

Robin Bayne

I am a breast cancer survivor of two years, but I can still recall like yesterday hearing the diagnosis from my doctor of more than twenty years. That summer remains a blur in my mind—tests, surgeries, appointments, etc. and constant prayer. The blessings that have come from this mess are in the friends I’ve made and other survivors I may have helped along the way.