Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing. [James 1:2-4 (NLT)]
Back in the days before coronary artery bypass surgery and angioplasty, my father had heart disease and often suffered from the burning chest pain of angina. When that occurred, he would stop briefly, place a nitroglycerin tablet under his tongue, and his pain would ease. Medical nitroglycerin acts as a vasodilator by dilating or expanding the blood vessels so the heart doesn’t have to work as hard to pump blood through those vessels.
When I was a little girl and my dad took one of his nitro tablets, I didn’t know how they worked. Having seen enough Saturday matinees to know that liquid nitroglycerin is so unstable that the slightest jolt can cause it to explode, I couldn’t understand how my father could safely carry it around in his pocket, let alone put it in his mouth. After all, when Tweety Bird put it in Sylvester’s medicine, the cat blew up! Elmer Fudd used it when battling Bugs Bunny, and I’m sure Wyle E. Coyote purchased some from Acme in his effort to destroy the Roadrunner. The bad guys in westerns blew up train tracks, bank safes, or mines with nitroglycerin and I wondered how something capable of blasting a hole in the side of a mountain could keep my father’s heart from exploding in a heart attack.
Whether in its liquid form or stabilized with clay in dynamite, nitroglycerin is the most dangerous and unstable explosive there is and yet both explosive and medical nitroglycerin have the same chemical formula. How can one can destroy us while the other helps? The difference is that medical nitro is highly diluted, given in a minute dose, and stabilized when manufactured. The trials in our lives are a little like nitroglycerin. Whether they destroy or help us depends on what we make of them and how we use them. We live in an imperfect fallen world and, like it or not, every one of us will face ordeals and troubles throughout our lives. Some we bring on ourselves as consequences of our own sin. But, as happened with Job, many of life’s trials seem as undeserved, random, and unexpected as a tornado; they can descend upon us without rhyme or reason. Without God, those trials can demolish our lives as easily as nitroglycerin can demolish a building. With God, however, like medicinal nitroglycerin, trials can help our heart for Him.
God’s purpose isn’t to give us easy comfortable lives; He wants us to grow into the image of his son, Jesus Christ (which is what sanctification is all about). Everything in our lives, both good and bad, is designed to help us reach that goal. Unfortunately, when all is going smoothly, we tend to forget about God, just as easily as my father forgot about his diseased heart when relaxing in his recliner. But, just as the pain from stress or strenuous exercise made him turn to his nitro, trials force us to turn to God.
I lose the analogy between trials and nitroglycerin here because, while those tiny nitro pills alleviated the pain in my father’s chest, they didn’t cure his heart disease. They were a temporary fix and he died of a massive heart attack at the age of 56. Trials, however, do more than ease the symptoms of what’s wrong with us; they can actually shape and fix us. Unlike heart disease, disappointment, despair, and disaster don’t have to kill us. Faith is a muscle and, just like the heart, it grows stronger when it is exercised. Somewhat like bypass surgery and cardiac rehab, God fixes our hearts with trials—it may hurt for a while but it gets better and we get stronger!
Whether our trials are as destructive as liquid nitroglycerin or as therapeutic as nitroglycerin pills depends upon our reaction to them. We can become bitter or we can consider them blessings in disguise. We can rebel or choose to trust God and accept His grace to deal with our difficulty and pain. Rather than a cardiologist, we have the Holy Spirit who will give us all of the comfort, strength, and wisdom we need to endure our trials. Because of Him, we can emerge from our trials with mended hearts and a stronger, purer, and more mature faith.
Trials are medicines which our gracious and wise physician prescribes because we need them; and he proportions the frequency and weight of them to what the case requires. [John Newton]
Devotions of the Heart 