Ch 2 A Happy Ending with No Ending – Randy Alcorn

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Ch 2 A Happy Ending with No Ending – Randy Alcorn’s 90 Days of God’s Goodness

We are to rejoice in our inheritance in Heaven even as God sovereignly uses difficulties in our lives as a fire to refine, purify, and strengthen our faith. I’ll never forget my first thirty seconds of high school. I walked in the front door, tripped, and fell on my face … right in front of three cheerleaders. They laughed hysterically. Not a good start for a freshman desperately wanting to be cool! At the time, that incident hurt worse than my serious ankle injury while playing football. Yet forty years later, even though I still remember it vividly, it brings me absolutely no pain. It just makes me laugh.

Of course, my teenage troubles do not compare to having cancer, being tortured, or seeing a child die. I only mean that although certain experiences brought me genuine pain when they happened, with the passing of time and gaining of perspective, they no longer do. If we sometimes recognize this in daily life, shouldn’t we suppose that many of our most painful ordeals will look quite different a million in our lives on Earth? What if we see that every agony was part of giving birth to an eternal joy?

I watched an interview with two families whose daughters, students at Taylor University, suffered a terrible car accident in 2006. A truck hit a van head-on, killing five people. At the accident scene, someone found Laura Van Ryn’s purse next to Whitney Cerak. Workers at the scene mistook the students, both blondes, for each other. Laura, misidentified as Whitney, was pronounced dead at the scene, while Whitney, misidentified as Laura, fought for her life on the way to the hospital.

Some fourteen hundred people attended “Whitney’s” funeral, and her father spoke at the service. No one suspected that the body they buried that day was Laura Van Ryn’s. For five weeks, the Ceraks believed their daughter had died, while the Van Ryns thought their daughter lived.

Ch 2 A Happy Ending with No Ending – Randy Alcorn’s 90 Days of God’s Goodness

Ch 2 A Happy Ending with No Ending – Randy Alcorn

Conflict With A Purpose Intro and Ch 1: 90 Days of God"s Goodness by Randy Alcorn

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Conflict With A Purpose Intro and Ch 1: 90 Days of God’s Goodness by Randy Alcorn


Then Joseph said to his brothers, “Come close to me.” When they had done so, he said, “I am your brother Joseph, the it was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you. For two years now there has been famine in the land, and for the next five years there will not be plowing and reaping. But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.

“So then, it was not you who sent me here, but God. He made me father to Pharaoh, lord of his entire household and ruler of all Egypt.… “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” —GENESIS 45:4–8; 50:20 After Job had prayed for his friends, the LORD made him prosperous again and gave him twice as much as he had before. All his brothers and sisters and the trouble the LORD had brought upon him.… The LORD blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the first. —J OB 42:10–12

While most of my books are Now, if I were to write a novel about lives without conflict, where characters get everything they want, where life marches on comfortably and no one ever loses anything, nobody would read it. Who likes a boring story? In fact, my central characters always face great conflict, turmoil, uncertainty, and suffering. Some die. That it makes for a far better story is my main reason for doing this. (We enjoy in fiction much that we do not enjoy in life.) So who am I to say that God shouldn’t write such things into his story, including my part? just literature, we repeatedly see that protection from conflict produces soft, spoiled, and selfish people, while enduring conflict is more likely to produce someone strong, capable, and caring.

If, in an interview with a character from one of my novels, you were to ask whether he’d like to be written out of the story, he would answer no. Nonexistence appeals to no one. Now ask him if he would like to suffer less, and he’ll answer yes.

Conflict With A Purpose Intro and Ch 1: 90 Days of God’s Goodness by Randy Alcorn

Conflict With A Purpose Intro and Ch 1: 90 Days of God"s Goodness by Randy Alcorn