Where Is God When A Child Suffers? - Softcover

Giesbrecht, Penny

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0929292022 ISBN 13: 9780929292021

Publisher: Hannibal Books, 2006

Synopsis

Penny and Tim Giesbrecht naively believed that bad things couldn't happen to good Christians. Until their "perfect" baby began exhibiting such strange behavior that "it seemed the Jeremy we knew had died." Two years of painful tests brought no answers. Then Jeremy was severely burned. As he screamed in pain, his mother cried, "Dear God, where are you?" In her much sought-after book, which was first published in 1988 and re-released in 2005, Penny Giesbrecht explores the feeling a parent in such situations experiences and also Scripture admonitions and teachings about suffering. Dr. Ross Campbell, author of How to Really Love Your Child wrote the foreword.

About this title

From the Publisher

Penny Giesbrecht shoves aside the platitudes and cuts to the chase with her testimony of deep, personal anguish in the suffering of her son, Jeremy. She minces no words in describing how she freely and unabashedly shakes her fist at God for allowing such a tragedy and then, like the psalmist, returns to praise God for the ampleness of His grace in these circumstances. This book will help any reader who wonders how he or she should respond in the face of a friend's or loved one's tragedy and affirms the time-honored wisdom of saying little more than "I'm sorry," allowing actions to speak louder than words. It's difficult to imagine how a book any more helpful or encouraging than this one could exist to pass on to a family experiencing trauma because of a child's pain. Persons in the ministry who are in the position of lending comfort to such families could well benefit from brushing up on their bedside decorum by reading about the Giesbrechts and what things they most needed to hear.

From the Author

Many people who really tried to help us when Jeremy was burned, were, in effect giving a Bandaid response to a major injury. Well-meaning friends and relatives wanted to find a reason for God allowing this to happen. However, our situation made some uncomfortable. If they accepted that Jeremy was burned just because he climbed on top of a stove and knocked a burner switch on, then they would also have to concede that something bad could happen to them or to their family, over which they had no control.

Many believe that if they pray for protection for their children, their kids will then always have a full stomach, never be killed in a traffic accident, or be burned in a fire. We had this mistaken belief, too. When we saw our Punky hooked up to machines and fighting for his life, we knew what we'd been believing wasn't making sense.

One of the outstanding attributes of God is His sorrow at the suffering of humankind. There is nothing to be sorry about if things are the way He wants them to be. Even though God is able to bring good out of evil situations, it does not follow that he intended or caused rape, murder, poisonous pollution, child abuse, and other bad things. God's power to bring good out of evil doesn't make evil good.

When Tim and I realized that God wasn't pulling strings to allow suffering in the life of Jeremy, specifically, we were freed to really love God. Suffering is a result of the world we live in. God isn't doing it. If God were interfering and intervening with the choices of men and women and the natural flow of the world, He would be denying the humanness He Himself created. Suffering is part of earth-side living. The suffering are not specially chosen out by God to suffer for a specific reason, any more than you are especially blessed or privileged by Him. I urge you to wrestle with this issue. Seek truth. It will revolutionize your life. How you pray. How you live. And most particularly, how you comfort the suffering.; REVIEW: "Every five or ten years a really good book comes along on suffering. C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain and Phillip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts? are classics. Penny Giesbrecht's Where Is God When a Child Suffers? is the book for now. . . . How I wish there had been a book like this when my wife, Pat, and I were suffering with our daughter Kathy . . . when we couldn't understand. . . . Here are two wonderful, Christ-loving, Bible-believing Christian parents faced with some of the most awesome problems about life . . . How Penny . . . puts things together is really outstanding." (Ross Campbell, M.D., author of How to Really Love Your Child, How to Really Love Your Teenager, How to Really Know Your Child, and other best-selling parenting books.)

Edition details

• Publisher: Hannibal Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0929292022
• ISBN 13: 9780929292021
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 180