Sometimes you learn as much about someone in death as you do from her life. This is not so unusual when the deceased is not from your generation or if you happened not to be especially close, acquaintances perhaps but nothing more. Sometimes a person can be a good friend and there can still be things one learns after death that one did not know before.

Recently Mabel Draffin, 87, died, a charter member of our church. She was a good friend. Yet, I learned more about her after her death than I did during the time I knew her. I learned how she met her husband, Fondren, a marriage that lasted over 60 years. I learned how much she desired to go to college following high school but there was no money available. I learned how hard she worked at her early jobs at a hardware store and at the Jospeh Campbell Soup company in Cairo.

I learned that Dr. Norman Vincent Peale became an important part of her early Christian life after she and her husband attended services at the First Methodist Church in Wichita Falls, Texas, during the early ’40’s when Fondren was in the Army. Although she had been a Christian since the age of 12, she was not a happy Christian. She writes, “I worried a lot, mostly about things I had no control over, but Dr. Peale changed that. He taught me that Christians should be the happiest people in the world, and the way to be happy is to make Jesus Christ Lord of my life.”

Although I knew Mabel had been a Sunday school teacher, I didn’t know how much she labored each week in preparing her lessons. With the commitment of a pastor laboring over a sermon, she began on Monday studying the text, making handwritten notes, reading commentaries, praying, and going back over material throughout the week. By Sunday her lesson was handwritten in a spiral notebook. In a room that had many college educated women, Mabel once commented to a family member that she felt she needed to be extra prepared to teach them.

In looking through some of Mabel’s material, I came across a lesson that I felt especially drawn to. Unlike many of the others, it was not handwritten. It was typed. Although she had other typed personal materials, this one had no name attached so I have no way of knowing if Mabel compiled it or whether there is another author. I do know the message is timeless.

If you are dealing with a particularly difficult time, let these words found among Mabel’s collection of Sunday school lessons be your source of strength today. Even if you never knew her, knowing this is the kind of lessons she taught others will give you a good idea what kind of faith she had and what kind of teacher she was.

“All things work together for good?” To any person of faith, that’s a heavy question. How shall we answer it? As I thought about it the other day, I ran across something in the Psalms that began to open up the answer for me.

“Happy are those who are strong in the LORD, who set their minds on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When they walk through the Valley of Weeping, it will become a place of refreshing springs, where pools of blessing collect after the rains!” Psalms 84:5-6 (NLT)

The writer of Ecclesiastes says over and over that life makes no sense. And we all know only too well how easily people will let us down and how easily we let ourselves down. No, we can’t trust life. Life will bring sickness, sorrow, disappointment, discouragement. And we can’t trust other people. They may turn on us, abandon us, reject us. And we certainly can’t trust ourselves, for we are all amazed at what we from time to time discover about ourselves — how deceitful we can be, how unloving we really are, how easily led astray we can become.

So it’s never enough to simply mouth, “All things work together for good.” Any simpleton can look around this world and come to the conclusion that it’s nothing more than an empty platitude. So, then — let’s look at that verse in its entirety. It says that “We know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.” Romans 8:28-29 (NLT)

Now we come to the heart of the matter. Do we love the Lord? Well, we say that we do. Again, we’re pretty good at mouthing our convictions in this matter. “Sure,” we say, “I love God.” But you say, the test of that love comes in the Valley of Weeping. Can you still stand and say, “I love You, God”? Can you say with Job, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him!”?

Now there’s a man who really understood the meaning of the verse about which we’re talking. Do you think he knew for sure that God would restore everything to him? Could he, Job, see ahead and know that his future would be glorious? Did he know that no good thing would be withheld from him if he would but keep on walking the path God had set for him? I don’t think so!

He didn’t trust life or his friends or even himself! He simply trusted God. Job could have looked around at the utter desolation and ruin. He could have centered on his total aloneness. He could have simply clung to his pain. Oh, he struggled, but he knew that to fit in with God’s purposes means to ultimately yield to God — it means to submit to God, it means to offer all to God — it means to yield even your pain and doubt and grief to God.

And so it is with us. As we walk through the Valley of Weeping, we have two choices. We can watch the storm. We can focus on the raging thunder and lightning and destruction being wrought. We can always allow fear to completely overwhelm us and where there is fear there can never be perfect trust or perfect love. And so, the storm will defeat us and we will come out of the entire experience scratching our head and saying, “I just don’t understand. I’ve always thought God was on my side. I’ve always tried to be on His side. How can all destruction be?”

Or, we can keep our eyes — both inner eyes and outer eyes focused on Jesus and Jesus alone. And while everything falls to ruin around us, we continue to look only to Him, refusing to look to the right or left lest we lose sight of His face. And then we will make the Valley of Weeping to become a place of springs where pools of blessing and refreshment collect after rains.



 The Rev. Michael Helms is pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in Moultrie.