Lamentations 3:38 Is it not from the mouth of the Most High that woe and well-being proceed?

  Yes, it is, and both occur at His word.  Both are ministered impartially, and both fit perfectly into God’s attributes of love, grace and justice.

  In the very boring novel The Hour I First Believed writer Wally Lamb tells the story of a man and wife whose lives were devastated by the mass murder that occurred at Colombine High School in Colorado.  The wife, a school nurse, hid inside a cabinet to avoid being shot.  From there she heard the cursing and taunting of the two teenage shooters and the pleas of intended victims as they begged to be spared.  She heard the shots and the cries of agony.  While not killed she suffered from a severe case of post traumatic stress syndrome.  To deal with the aftermath and the lingering terror she began to manipulate doctors and steal drugs in order to cope with her anxieties and depression.  One evening after having swallowed some drugs stolen from a nursing home where she worked, she hit a young man on the road and killed him.  Convicted of vehicular homicide she was sentenced to five years in the penitentiary.  After she had passed the half way point in her sentence, when she and her husband could begin to see some hope for the future, she suffered a brain aneurysm and died.

  In the immediate days following the tragic loss of his wife the husband had the company of a young woman who had also survived Colombine.  She was a homeless drug abuser and prostitute who had adopted the man and his wife as her surrogate parents.  Shortly before the death of her adopted “mom” she had found a good job, a romantic interest in a recovered drug addict, and had become pregnant.  Riding in the car with the aggrieved husband one day, she asked if he would like to feel the baby kick in her womb.  He placed his hand on her swollen stomach and for the first time in his life felt the wonder of an unborn baby moving beneath his hand.  It was that experience that Lamb used to close this 700-plus pages of sheer boredom with the words, “That was the hour I first believed.”

  Faked out by the title of the book, I checked it out from the library and suffered through all those pages just to arrive at that point.  (I DO NOT recommend this book for anyone.  In addition to its boring content it contains terrible language.)  I will not say that the ending made it worth the pain, but it does seem to have an application to today’s verse of scripture.

  The character in the book had passed through years of anguish watching his beloved wife struggle with her PTSD only to lose her, first to drugs, then to imprisonment and finally death.  Job in our Bible would probably have identified well with this character.  Yet in the end he encountered the marvel of new life being formed in the body of a young woman who called him “dad,” and for the first time ever he believed in God.  Wally Lamb did not take the time to explain “That was the hour I first believed,” but it does seem that the man in the novel came to realize that from the mouth of the Most High .proceeds both woe and well-being.