I Was Just Thinking LET ME BE A POTATO
	JUNE 2005

by Don Huntington, Editor In Chief

A man who has not suffered, what does he know? (Henry Suso)

I’ve learned that there’s much more to life than merely learning to cope with difficulties because there’s a vast difference between what I think is good and what is actually good for me. If I could control my circumstances, I would surely be enormously wealthy. I would have unfailing good health. Nobody I knew would ever grow ill or die. Everyone would be loving and kind. Nobody would gossip about me or treat me with anything but kindness and deference. I would be admired and honored by everybody who ever knew me.

God knows that if I really could live life like that, however, I would probably be a completely worthless human being and would become a self-important, conceited hypocrite. I need to learn to love profoundly. I need to learn patience, humility, compassion, and sensitivity to others’ needs. I must learn to be a person of deliberate prayer and meditation — conscious always of my dependence upon my Creator.

The annoying reality is that I only discover the power of love when I’m in a situation that could make me hate, only learn to pardon by being injured, only learn real faith when faced with great doubt, only learn real hope in the face of despair, real light in the face of darkness, ultimate joy only after profound sadness, and real understanding after great confusion. Only personal troubles will really develop my patience. Personal failure is the soil in which my humility can grow strong. Pain and suffering are the experiences that develop my sense of compassion and sensitivity. God uses times of trouble to soften me so that He can mold my soul into the shape of His will.

“Show me a person who has never suffered a loss,” a clinical psychologist said, “and I will show you a person who has not evolved at all.” The death of my 13-year-old brother-in-law, Rodney, created a sense of loss that can bring tears to my eyes even four decades after the fact. But through that loss we all discovered by experience that we were held by hands that would never drop us. How else could we learn that?

I’ve been through some tough times in the past year, having faced a potentially dangerous bout of cancer and the death of my mom, for example. Both those things brought pain and even anguish in my heart, but they also provided occasions to mount to heights that I had not attained to before. I learned that good health acquires a deeper significance after a person has experienced a life-threatening illness. I discovered that belief in heaven has a more profound dimension when the believer’s mother is there.

The encyclopedia says that Henry Suso, the source of today's quote, "... was broken by hardships, persecutions, and slander." In response he wrote the Little Book of Eternal Wisdom and the Little Book of Truth. He would apparently be able to say from his heart that his sufferings had guided him to the "eternal wisdom" and "truth" about which he wrote.

"There is no education like adversity," someone said. The Master himself suffered and died and even about Him the Bible makes the enigmatic comment, "Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered." We all see things during times of darkness that the sunshine hides from our eyes.

I once read a wonderfully stirring account in an issue of Guidepost Magazine:

While my husband Frank and I were living in Pakistan many years ago, our six-month-old baby died. An old Punjabi who heard of our grief came to comfort us. "A tragedy like this is similar to being plunged into boiling water," he explained. "If you are an egg, your affliction will make you hard-boiled and unresponsive. If you are a potato, you will emerge soft and pliable, resilient and adaptable."

It may sound funny to God, but there have been times when I have prayed, "O Lord, let me be a potato."

Or as someone said, with an even more prosaic description of the grace the Punjabi was talking about, “Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.”

I have no martyr complex. I pray all the time that God will hold back dark times from me and from those I love. But my hand is in His for whatever is going to happen in this world. And if the worse comes, "O Lord," I pray with that bereaved parent, "let me be a potato!"