Romans 8:28… most of us know it by heart… and it’s a favorite!
Hi, I'm Joni Eareckson Tada and as always welcome to "Joni and Friends" where I like to take a close look at God's Word through the window of our suffering. Like my friend David Kuo – I first met David back in Washington DC when he worked in the office of Faith-Based Initiatives under President George Bush… a bright man; an intelligent man; a wonderful Christian, husband, and father to two dear little ones. It was a storybook life until… David discovered he had cancer, a very bad kind of cancer. The kind that even after years of treatment and chemotherapy, was still cropping up on the PET scan. And David’s latest battle against cancer was when it settled into his brain.
Ken and I joined up to serve on David’s prayer team – every day we lifted him up before the Lord, asking God for healing, hope, and courage. And this man really needed it. I won’t go into all the awful details but his ordeal was a gut-wrenching nightmare of chemotherapy and high-power radiation that completely decimated his body. At times, after those awful treatments, his wife had to almost carry him from the car to the house; David would gather enough strength to greet his two young children, and then collapse in a whimpering heap behind the bedroom door. It was awful.
But we prayed, and so did thousands of others. And miracle of miracles, earlier this season when David and his wife went in for a consultation, the oenological surgeon walked in with his x-rays and just sat down shaking his head. “I can’t explain it,” the doctor said, “I don’t understand it, but look here your brain tumor is gone, completely gone.” The doctor held up the images. Before, where there was an ugly dark mask, now, it was clean, clear and white. The Kuos looked at each other in stunned amazement. God had given them what they had desperately sought Him for: a miracle.
Later in an email to all of us who prayed, David wrote the most remarkable thing, and I just have to share it with you. He wrote, “An oft-repeated metaphor of how God brings all things together for good is the sound of tuning-up a symphony before a performance -- the wailing, off-key, discordant wall of sound hardly belies the majesty that follows when the conductor finally brings it all together to make beautiful music. We’ve all heard that metaphor, but it so sells God short. After all, looking at all the instruments, it doesn’t take much imagination to envision them coming together to make beautiful music. That’s no miracle. No, when it comes to God working discordant, crazy, off-key things together for good, imagine instead standing in Times Square and listening to trucks honking and the sputter and grinding of jackhammers and screeching tires and engines running; hear and smell and see the people working on all buildings, the exhaust, the fire trucks going by. Now, imagine in an instant, all those brash and blustering sounds being summoned into perfect harmony, and from the noise now comes Handel’s Messiah. That, I think, is closer to capturing the transforming and redeeming work of God – yes, He can make the taxicabs sing. "
And David the miracle man, would quote Romans 11, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! … For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen.”
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