When in doubt, it's what He said.

One of the things a Christian must come to grips with in the face of terrible crisis is the truth of what God has said about Himself and our situation in a fallen world as fallen people. No one will ever write the book that will prepare a parent for the heartache involved in helping a desperately ill child fight cancer. The only thing that holds any hope in that situation are the words of the One who can rescue us from our greatest crisis, our own sin. And having said that, I am reminded of the times when Jacob would ask me questions for which I had no answer in and of myself and frankly, they were questions in which I had no confidence in what God  had said. Yet, despite my doubts, I told him what God had to say about such things. In the end there are no better answers than those offered to us by Scripture for life's most terrible questions. The following is from the rediscovered folder and is another attempt on my part to put into words the sense I was trying to make out of Jacob's struggle.
*******************************************

An instrument of God will be bent and broken, twisted and torn, and as one looks on from the outside, it would seem that God is an inept craftsman to damage His tools so. But the outsider is exactly that because they only view the process and cannot see the painstaking art that results from the battering of God. They do not see that through pain and anguish great rewards are being reaped.

If God turns all things to the good for those who love Him, then private, personal suffering must reap great  benefits for the sufferer and very likely for the few intimate witnesses to the kind of suffering experienced by a dying loved one. How else could the private suffering of a saint in a far away prison cell work together for good? It is for the good of the individual suffering and to cut short that time of suffering in the name of being merciful or for any other reason may very well be to rob the sufferer of great heavenly reward. I don't know, but this proposition seems reasonable to me, at least with the depth of thought I have been forced too bring too the matter.