Nothing is meaningless in the world of the believer. Everything has a purpose; and in a world ruled by a loving God, the purpose is always to use every encounter to shape us into the perfect image of our Lord. Every difficulty will be turned to our favor and help us to become “perfect and complete, lacking nothing” (James 1:4). Or, in Paul’s words, to become more than conquerors.

Making the Vital Choice

Paul expressed the unwavering constancy of God’s love through pairs of dynamic opposites: death or life, things present or things to come, height or depth. I want to close by expressing, in the same way, your choice of how to live in the face of difficulty. I will offer you two stories, each expressing an opposite end of the spectrum. You must decide which one expresses true reality.

The Romanian Elie Wiesel, winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize, was not a stranger to suffering. He endured four German prison camps during World War II—Birkenau, Auschwitz, and Buna—before finally being liberated from Buchenwald in 1945.

Wiesel and his father were placed in Birkenau, while the rest of his family was sent to the gas chambers. Wiesel watched his father deteriorate until, finally, he was beaten to death by the guards. Other prisoners often beat Wiesel himself simply to steal his meager food ration.

On being liberated, he left prison shaken to the very core and would not talk about his ordeal for ten years. At the end of that time, he wrote a grim little memoir called Night, in which he offered the following account of his first night in camp and what it did to his soul:

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in the camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.

Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which deprived me, for all eternity, of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never.9

As Elie Wiesel was suffering his dark night of the soul, a Dutch woman named Corrie ten Boom had also descended into the same hell on earth. She and her family had sheltered Jews in their home, protecting them from being spirited away to the German camps. An informant turned them in, and soon the ten Booms themselves were on a truck.