Endure your trials as discipline.

"Endure your trials as “discipline”.  (Hebrews 12: 7).

It was one Sunday morning at the 10 am Mass that I heard the above Scripture from the Altar.  I was in the midst of the most severe desert experience of my life. I had lost everything including health.  As I listened on, I heard this:

"For what “son” is there whom his father does not discipline?" (v 7).  Is God saying that He is my Father?  Is my crisis therefore not divine retribution but training?  Then came the closing argument for me:

"If you are without discipline, in which all have shared, you are not sons but bastards." 
(Hebrews 12: 8).

Indeed I had been without discipline for many years.  I welcomed this word of God into my heart with faith.  I went home, found the passage in my Bible and read and re-read it that blessed Sunday. What returns shall I make to the Lord for the wonderful thing He did for me on this Sunday?

"Bless the LORD, O my soul; and all my being, bless his holy name. Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.

"As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him. For he knows how we are formed; he remembers that we are dust.
 
"But the kindness of the LORD is from eternity to eternity toward those who fear him.  And his justice toward children’s children among those who keep his covenant." (Psalm 103:1-2, 13-14, 17-18).

God is good all the time is not an empty slogan. It is a most profound truth.

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