The following is an excerpt from a book about suffering written by Timothy Downing, Missionary in Ecuador. The book is titled: The Storm Will Come Building Foundations for Inevitable Suffering
A Word From The Author
I watched my father suffer physically for many years, his body gradually betraying the strength that had defined him throughout his life. What strikes me now, in the quiet aftermath of his passing, is not the catalog of his afflictions but the absence of complaint—save for the occasional involuntary groan that escaped his lips when pain pressed beyond the boundaries of stoic endurance.
The telephone call was international as I am serving as a missionary in Ecuador. I was hosting a team of short-term workers whose earnest enthusiasm filled our group with the kind of hopeful energy that missions work both requires and sustains. My mother’s voice carried across continents and years of accumulated worry: “your father has suffered a major heart attack. Come immediately.” The cruel arithmetic of responsibility meant I could not abandon my post until the team departed—duty, even in crisis, maintains its claims upon us.
Providence granted me several good weeks with him before the very bad weeks that followed, those final days when death arrived not as sudden visitor but as patient tenant, taking up residence in the corners of the bedroom he had constructed with his own hands where hospice nurses hummed their ghastly vigil. In those hours between morphine doses, when clarity briefly pierced the pharmaceutical haze, my father spoke of his heart attack with something that initially bewildered me: gratitude.
“During the attack,” he explained with the deliberate care of a man choosing his final words precisely, “I could not breathe. I felt like I was suffocating—just like our Savior did on the cross.” He paused, and I witnessed something I had seen throughout his life but never fully comprehended: the transformation of suffering into offering. “I was grateful,” he continued, “for the opportunity to enter into the same kind of suffering that Jesus experienced.”
This was not the sentiment of a man seeking comfort through pious platitudes, nor the desperate rationalization of someone unable to face harsh reality. This was the testimony of a soul that had learned, through decades of smaller trials, how to meet the ultimate trial with the resources of faith. When I suffer—and I will suffer, as will you—I want to suffer with such gratitude. More importantly, I want you to be so firmly rooted in the faith that you, too, can meet your appointed trials with this same spirit of grateful endurance.
This book is written from that conviction: that suffering well is not merely a personal aspiration but a Christian obligation, and that such suffering is impossible without foundations laid deep in the bedrock of biblical truth and historical Christian wisdom.
We’re delighted to share this book with you one post at a time. If you’d prefer to hold this book in your hands—there’s something beautiful about turning actual pages as you study God’s Word—you can easily order a physical copy from Amazon by simply clicking on the book image above.
