I am thrilled to be sharing this issue of The Encourager with you because the most precious treasure Dave and I found during our time of adversity and pain was the discovery that our relationship with God was real.

Lucy grew up without a father and lost her mother to cancer when she was a teenager, so family was extremely important to her. When she and her husband had children, they worked hard to provide a safe, nurturing, family atmosphere. As committed Christians, they attended church regularly and also enjoyed the support of a close-knit, extended family that shared their faith. Of course Lucy and her husband knew they weren’t perfect parents, but family was their top priority and they di... (continued)

Months have passed since Lucy put her big, bulky box in her hall closet. It is still there. Whenever Lucy has a new prayer request for her daughter, she writes it down on a piece of paper, opens the closet, and places the request into the box. This symbolic gesture reminds Lucy that as she continues to pray for her daughter, God is the one who carries the burden. It is Lucy’s visual expression of faith that the same powerful God who met her on that terrible, d... (continued)

Let him who walks in the dark, who has no light,
trust in the name of the LORD and rely on his God.
Isaiah 50:10

Pastor Ron Mehl was intimately familiar with the landscape of suffering. For 22 years, he lived in the shadowlands of a long-term cancer battle. For at least 15 of those years, he was in chemotherapy, and for the last decade of his life, his entire body ached as if he had a... (continued)

Surrender to God in the midst of difficult circumstances is the way to find peace, but sometimes we are confused about what true surrender entails. If we think surrender is simply resigning ourselves to what we cannot change, peace will most certainly evade us. Peace lies in acceptance, not in resignation. Perhaps Creath Davis’ poem will help clarify the important difference between resignation and acceptance.

Resignation is surrender to fate.
A... (continued)

In this, the final issue of "The Treasures of Darkness" series, we are displaying some of the rich jems that treasure seekers discovered in their relationship with God.

The Treasure of Discovering God’s Character
The long, dark days of suffering that Michelle Dacus* endured enabled her to "see the different faces of the Lord. I saw His faithfulness and His sufficiency. I experienced how He gives you strength to keep going. I found that He is good, even when life do... (continued)

All my longings lie open before you,
O Lord; my sighing is not hidden from you.

Psalm 38:9

Joanie Thompson was well acquainted with the world of suffering and how God could make His presence known in the midst of it. Through her prayer ministry, she had seen God’s love, peace and unmistakable presence touch the hearts of the broken women who had come to her for prayer. She marveled agai... (continued)

Just because God doesn’t show up in the way we want or expect him to doesn’t mean He isn’t with us in our darkness. Sometimes it is easier to see Him if we know where and how to look:

Through Our Circumstances
During his wife’s extended battle with a degenerative illness, Rick Rood kept a journal in which he "recorded evidences of God’s hand on our lives. During the next twenty years, I returned to this discipli... (continued)

I found God in the darkness. Or, to be more accurate, God found me— and I wasn’t even looking for Him!

There’s no doubt I was in a desperate situation. I had no answers and absolutely no escape. But because I was an atheist, it never occurred to me to look to God for solutions. My heart wavered between despair and desperation, but even more troubling was the fact that I couldn’t get away from the gnawing sense that someone or something was trying t... (continued)