Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

We live in a world with people living under different circumstances and situations; however, whether we are chanced to be wealthy and privileged or poor and needy, an unavoidable reality we all have to face in this fallen world is the inevitability of suffering. When faced with loss, injury, betrayal, and all the worst this world has to offer, one's reaction may be that of sadness, confusion, or numbness, but the severity of the impact of a traumatic experience on a person hinges on the manner in which one processes and copes with it. I was born with an infirmity concerning my manhood, was taken advantage of, grew up in a dysfunctional household, and lost someone I loved. Yet, through all this, I have come to know there is no other route to victory over the evil of this world than the work that Jesus Christ did when he died on the cross and rose again on the third day in glory. I was just about a month from turning ten years old when the unthinkable happened- the eldest of my two sisters passed away after a long fight with sickle cell. While the loss of my dear big sister did leave me distraught, the main consequence of this that really affected me was that this blow compounded the dysfunctionality of my already fractured family. Coupled with this tragedy, I remember feeling such shame and resentment building up against my parents for not doing all they could to get me the proper treatment in time for the congenital deformity I was born with not to become permanent, and even though I knew it was because of a lack of resources, these were slowly turned into anger and disgust when accompanied with arguments and fights I ended up being roped into that served as a cruel reminder of their failing marriage and our unstable lives. In the years going into my adolescence, the foundation of these bottled-up experiences and emotions led me to seek the pleasure of vices common in my generation to cover up the feeling of being defeated by the circumstances of my life and the self-pity I felt served as a witness to justify the utter lasciviousness I indulged in to mask the emptiness I had. If someone were to ask me what specific event happened that changed everything, I wouldn't even be able to put my finger on it. But what I do know is that by the grace of God, he protected me in all those times, even when I didn't realize it. I was so absorbed in the way I saw our lives going that I became almost comfortable with the state of defeat life had beaten me into believing I was in. Still in love, Jesus just started to draw me to himself, showing me more and more my need for him as my Saviour, and in the newness of his resurrection life, I have found liberty from the weight of those experiences by picking up my cross instead.