How can I spiritually survive a severe physical trauma?

Just a few words more as to dear Eaden with the broken back. He still lives, as we write this. A monument of sovereign grace. Helpless as to the poor body. His little children around his bed. It grieves my heart to say there is frequently no provision for the need of these great sufferers; but God has lifted him up, superior to all circumstances. Filled with joy in Christ — waiting His will; and waiting His return from heaven. The following lines have been a source of great enjoyment to him. And with these words we must close our short paper on the Grace of God to the Collier with the Broken Back.

Weakness, however excessive, was therefore no occasion for despair. It was rather an occasion for proving divine sympathy and the fulness there is in Christ to supply suitable grace and strength for every sorrow throughout the pilgrimage. Moreover, He has qualified Himself for such priestly ministration by the trials He endured in the days of His flesh. The Lord suffered by reason of His faithfulness to God amid a sinful world. He met the power of Satan. Hence the compassion of our great High Priest in whatever befalls us by the way. He is still the same as when He wept with the sisters of Bethany before He gave them back their dead brother. He enters into our sorrows ere He delivers us out of them.

In addition to His support you have One who can enter into your pressure. "In all their affliction He was afflicted." You know He feels with you, but He is out of it, and He so soothes you by His company that you N are more occupied with your gain in Him than with your bereavement. With Him you are borne above it, and you can come boldly to the throne of grace to obtain mercy and find grace. Paul and Silas are a good example. They were in suffering, but they were most wonderfully supported above it. They were borne above it first, then mercy was vouchsafed. There was a great earthquake, and every one's bands were loosed.

Farewell, my dear sister; your poor body feels the pressure, but the Lord is under the load with you. There is a helper of infirmities. May His comforts refresh your soul.

God and the Spirit thus occupied with the feeble groaning saint! Again we have to say, by nothing short of Divine revelation could we have known this. The saint may feel that he does not know what to ask, as he suffers with Christ, and groans whilst awaiting the redemption of his body. He may at times feel himself alone on earth, in isolation of spirit from those immediately around him. But is he alone, who has the other Comforter taking such an active part on his behalf, and entering so deeply into his sorrows? Is he alone, who has such an intercessor interceding for him according to God? Do we not at times perhaps forget this? Yet, thank God, the other Comforter does not forget us: He, the Spirit of God, intercedes with God. That intercession must then be in perfect harmony with the mind of God. How this speaks of unabated concern on the part of our God in all that His people are passing through. God is not indifferent to their groanings. Nor are they, it is evident, to be stoics, or by some imaginative feeling to affect superiority to circumstances. No. We are feeble men and women. God knows it. And He has provided the other Comforter for us in our need. To sit down in despair would be to forget that the Spirit intercedes. To affect to be above feeling the sorrows would be really to despise this provision in ministry for us, which our God has so graciously revealed.

The bed of affliction becomes the bed of His remembrance — the place of sweet meditation. The sense of His protective covering sustains the joy of the soul.

Meanwhile the destitution of other help only shuts one up to God all the more. And the soul knows what help He has already given. Had it not been for this he would have already been dwelling in silence. But even when he had realized that his foothold was already gone, a Stronger than he, and with heart, not merely hand, supported him. Thus amid a multitude of anxieties within him, the comforts of God soothed — or, in the vivid imagery that he uses, "caressed" — his soul.

So the soul pleads, and pleads on, for He is gracious, baring its grief and the effect of it even upon the body. Is He not Creator? Has He not made the body? Does He not feel, who has given the very capacity of feeling? The wasting flesh, the quaking of the very bones, all the strong helpers bowed with this distress: what it speaks of a faith that, more than it might seem, knows the tender pity of Him with whom it has to do! Blessed be God, it is so: underneath all the doubt, and amid the darkness, the groping arms turn to the God that is. The cry may be, "Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!" But of Him that it would find it dares not doubt. Grace He has, heal He does, though as yet it sorely feels there is no healing; and as to itself the grace appears not.

Let us then exercise faith in face of the adverse forces of this world which we must needs encounter. He who has power to deliver has also sympathy for us in our infirmities, and can give us peace within before He gives peace around. And though we may not be immediately delivered, He will bear our infirmities and carry our sorrows. So that from our sea of tossing billows we may look upward to our Intercessor on high, and say: "Thou who hast trod the thorny road Wilt share each small distress: The love, which bore the greater load, Will not refuse the less,"

And the experience of Job is by no means unexampled, as most can testify from their own histories. But what sorrowing saint ever consulted the scriptures in faith and sought in vain for cheer and support? There the blessed Lord ever lives and speaks before the eyes and ears of His people. There we have the incomparable fact of God manifest in flesh upon earth, in the very midst of a world like ours. There we see His manhood bringing Him into daily contact with the abundant sorrows of this vale of tears; yet the glory of His Godhead outshining and forbidding us to think of Him as altogether such a one as ourselves. Hence nothing more quickly calms the troubled spirit than a reverent consideration of that Man of Sorrows Who "Himself took our infirmities and bore our sicknesses," of that Divine Word Who, while tabernacling among men, began to do what He will more perfectly accomplish in due time — to wipe away all tears from off all faces.