PAIN CAN PUT LIFE IN PERSPECTIVE

Affliction is particularly effective in helping us reevaluate our priorities.  When Thomas Chalmers became pastor of the church at Kilmany, Scotland in 1803, he was a young man of twenty-three with little real interest in religion.  He had taken the parish primarily so that he could also teach mathematics and astronomy.

As time went by, Chalmers neglected sermon preparation and the care of his people.  The church went into steady and precipitous decline.  After several years he was stricken with a serious illness.  For four months he was unable to leave his sick room, and for almost a year he did not preach.  Slowly he came to realize that his view of Christianity as simply an ethical system was not sufficient to see him through this valley of the shadow of death.  There in the lonely place of his illness he faced himself and the shallowness of his beliefs, until he experienced a dramatic religious conversion.

In the years that followed, Chalmers became the most powerful preacher in Scotland.  And with it, he came to have a compelling social conscience.  The finest pulpits in Scotland were available to him, but he also chose to minister to the poorest of the population in special services on a tanner's second story.  A century later Lord Roseberry said of him, "An illness lifted him into a higher sphere, and he soared aloft."  Illness can do that to us, because it helps us get our values in order.

-- J. Ellsworth Kalas in “If Experience Is Such a Good Teacher Why Do I Keep Repeating the Course?”


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