Some Inspiring thoughts from Johny (Late John George Samuel) 

Faith 

• When God is going to do something wonderful, He begins with a difficulty. When He is going to do something really wonderful, He begins with an impossibility. (John. 11:4; Dan.3:25; 1Pet. 5:10)

• When facing difficulties we should have the faith that the Lord is with us. We can handle them easily. (Ps. 23:4; Ps. 46:1; Mat. 1:23)

• If we trust in God, He will make the impossible possible, and will do only what is best for us. (John. 11:40; Ps. 125:1; Jer. 17:7; Heb. 11:1) 

Prayer

• God’s intervention is often the result of our intercession. (Gen.18:30; Deut.9:8; Mat. 15:27) 

• What shall I say? “Father, save me from this hour. Father, glorify your name!” (John 12:27, 28.)   
As a saint of God, my attitude towards sorrow and difficulty should not be to ask that they be prevented, but to ask, “God protect me so that I may remain what you created me to be, inspite of all my fires of sorrow.” (Ps. 70:5; 2 Sam. 22:23; 1king. 18:10)

• God may delay His plans, but He will never desert them. (Job. 8:20; Ps. 89:33; 2 Pet. 3:9-10) 

Facing Difficulties

• God may not give us an easy journey to the Promised Land, but He will give us a safe one.(1 Thess. 3:3; 1Pet. 4:1; 2 Tim. 3:12) 

• The world may ask you to hit-back and get it out of your system, but God asks you to sit-back and get Him into your system, allowing Him to handle things. (2 Cor. 2:14; Rom. 1:28; Col. 1:10) 

• “Even the most tempestuous wind cannot disturb the quietness of the stars.” (Heb. 7:25;2; 2 Tim. 1:12; Dan. 3:17)

Some Inspiring thoughts from Johny (Late John George Samuel)

 Faith

¨     God expects His children to be confident in Him so that in any crisis they become 

       reliable.(Heb. 13:5,6; Is. 41:10; 43:2, 18-20)

¨      Look, He is coming with the clouds.(Revelation 1:7)

If there were never any clouds in our lives, we would have no faith. They are a sign that God is there. What a revelation it is to know that sorrow, bereavement, and suffering are actually the clouds that come along with God! (Mat. 17:21; Ps. 58:11; Eccles. 8:11; Heb. 12:11)

¨     We also can do marvellous things by trusting in God.(2 Sam. 22:29; 2 Kin. 3:16-23; 2 Chr. 20:22)

Prayer

¨  Time spent in prayer gives more power to overcome temptations(Mat. 14:23; Mark. 14:32; Luke. 22:40)

¨  When I come into contact with the every day occurrences of life as an ordinary human being, is the prayer of God’s eternal Son being prayed in me? (Ps. 51:17;  Rom. 8:8; 15:1-3; Heb. 11:5)

¨  The point of prayer is not to get answers from God, but to have perfect and complete oneness with Him. When you seem to have no answer, there is always a reason.(John. 15:7; Ps. 66:18; Mark. 11:24)

Facing Difficulties

¨    Trials, when very heavy, kill very few people. But they make great ones.(2 Tim.2:3; Heb. 11:17; Job. 42:5)

¨ The path of sorrow and that path alone leads to the land where sorrow is unknown.(Heb 12:10; Gal. 5:24; Jer. 9:7)

¨  “The glory of tomorrow is rooted in the drudgery of today”.(John. 9:1-3; Ps. 34:19-20; Is. 26:16)

Raise Your Line of Limitations Part II

Raise Your Line of Limitations Part II

Continued from previous blog…

Johny’s scar was a skin burn caused while he was cyanosed for over two hours in June 1996. A team of a dozen people, including doctors, tried to revive him, as the attack happened during the day. Among the many things they used to treat him, was a hot-water bag to warm up his chest. It resulted in severe skin burns both on his chest and back. For several weeks, he could only lie down on his side.

I was away when the cyanosis occurred—the worst and the longest he experienced in all his years. When I returned from my trip abroad, I found him sitting on a stool (with no skin across large areas of his chest and back) and writing, “even when everything looks bad, God is good”.

Later I found another thought, in his diary, “God chooses what we go through, but we choose how we go through it”. Surely, it is our choice whether to praise God for all things at all times, or curse and murmur and think negatively.

The skin burn on his chest was healed in about six weeks. But the burn on his back persisted. After two months, we took Johny to the hospital for skin graft surgery. When everything was ready, the Doctors found severe bacterial infection on the skin that was to be peeled off from his thigh for grafting onto his back. So he was sent home with medication for three weeks to control the infection.

On our way home from the hospital, Johny told me, “Perhaps we are giving a little more time to God to heal me without surgery”. He was willing to undergo skin graft surgery, although he would have preferred being healed without it. Anyway he was happy that the surgery was postponed.

After three weeks, we checked with the hospital about bringing him back for skin graft surgery. This time, the hospital informed us that the surgeon was on sick-leave. By the time he returned, we found that the burn on his back had been covered with a thin layer of skin. There was no need for skin graft after all! Since then, we began to say, “Let us give a little more time to God”—instead of jumping into a sudden and hurried course of action.

Raise Your Line of Limitations

Raise Your Line of Limitations

As they grew up, my sons, Johny and Ronnie (who were diagnosed with CF) spent most of their time at home. Although Johny could study only up to the sixth grade in school and Ronnie up to the eighth, they both continued their studies using a home-study program called the ACE program. Elizabeth, my wife was always with them, ready to take care of their needs.

She was very alert in monitoring their condition. Both the boys would become cyanotic and unconscious (breathless and blue); both were susceptible to infection, and tended to lose sodium when they were unwell or when they perspired in warm weather. They had to be watched for vomiting and diarrhea.

Annie was doing a Masters program in Computer Applications, and so was home only during the week-ends. She was a great help to her brothers. She was the one who woke us up when the boys required help at night. It became a habit to check the boys whenever we woke up.

Everytime, they suffered an attack, we tried our best to revive them by giving them artificial respiration. Above all, we prayed. The first thing we made them utter when they became conscious was “Praise the Lord”. Very often we felt we were at the “end of the rope”; but it was never the end of our hope.

The boys never allowed their illness to defeat them. When someone commented on the thin and weak hands of Ronnie, his response was that he placed his feeble hands into God’s able hands. When Elizabeth fell ill, I was naturally concerned about her as well as the care of the boys. But they came to me and said, they had discovered that they were able to do many things that Mommy had been doing for them all these years. They even began to help Elizabeth.

Johny’s positive attitude, in particular, carried him through the most challenging of times. At one point, he had to undergo foot surgery. The wound failed to heal, and two years later gangrene set in and the doctors were forced to amputate his leg. We did not know what to do—he seemed to have so many problems to face. Yet Johny found an appropriate thought to encourage us.

“When God is going to do something wonderful, He begins with a difficulty, and when He is going to do something really wonderful, He begins with an impossibility”.

Johny put together such encouraging thoughts in the book, ‘Precious thoughts for better living’. In the introduction, he wrote “This book is an evidence of how the impossible can be made possible… my threatening illness need not be a barrier to success”.

Just before the amputation of his leg, he wrote a book titled, “Impossible… but for God”, He said that God had a plan for his life, knowing well that he might not live another day. He remarked, “While God is interested in the ‘stars’ of achievement in some people, in others He is looking for ‘scars’ – because God Himself bears the scars of crucifixion”.

To be continued…