Philip Yancey is a New York Times bestselling author who, in his latest book, "What Good is God: In Search of a Faith That Matters,” tells of his travels to ten different countries from Mumbai, India to Memphis, Tennessee to find the answer (or answers) to that question. I was privileged to do an on-air interview with him recently and learn of the firsthand evidence he found that faith does indeed make a difference.
Your reaction may be, "You are not telling me anything I didn't already know. Of course faith makes a difference." From the center of my comfortable life it's easy for me to say that, too. Not so easy for one of the rescued Chilean miners to say but his words were, "I was with God and with the devil. And I reached out for God." Not so easy to say when thirty-two people are killed on a college campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, when we hear of those suffering from AIDS in South Africa, and women and children tortured in Ruanda, when the force of nature in the form of a tsunami ends thousands of lives.
Yancey concludes that the question, "What Good Is God" is lived out in the lives of believers, people like you and me and Christians throughout the world experiencing dire events but still keeping the faith. As a prison volunteer seeing her work bear fruit in the changed lives of many incarcerated there explained, "God was always there," she said, "I just had to make Him visible.” What a challenge to all of us, to make God visible to those around us.
Psalms 146:5-9
Jean Dean
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