We’re all taught that our trials serve to make us stronger, and we have seen that this is true. When we look back on the things we have endured, we can see how each difficult phase of our lives taught us, matured us, and brought us nearer to being the people we want to become.
In the religious nonfiction book “Forged in the Refiner’s Fire,” authors Candace E. Salima and Elizabeth Cheever have compiled twenty-two stories of challenge and trial, and the lesson that was learned through each.
Contributors include Merrill Osmond, who tells of a commitment he made and then was nearly forced to break, in an incident that would have ruined his reputation and possibly his career. Candace E. Salima recounts her difficulty in carrying children, and Hazel Jensen tells of a fall from a horse that crushed her body and nearly took her life. Willard Boyd Gardner, author and former SWAT officer, speaks about the spinal cord injury that took his career from him. In each of these stories, we see how these individuals lives took changes they never would have imagined, but how they were able to lean on the Lord and seek His help through the process.
As Shirley Bahlmann tells her story of depression, we learn the value of friends and family in our lives. Muriel Sluyter recounts how she learned to forge on with her ground-breaking writing career, despite the onslaught of vicious hate mail.
With each story, the reader sees that trials come in different forms to all of us. There’s no one set challenge that we all go through; they are tailor-made to fit our circumstances. But regardless of the trial, if we lean on the Lord to see us through, He will deliver us and bring us out stronger, brighter, and better on the other side.
(This book was published by Spring Creek in 2006.)