For the believer whose prayers have gone unanswered for years and who is still trying to work out what faithfulness looks like when the healing does not come.
The stoning of Paul at Lystra. It is hard to read it without thinking that Paul, lying in the dust outside the city, may have remembered another stoning — one he had once stood by and approved of.
Most of us were never handed the terms explicitly. We absorbed them slowly, in Sunday school and sermon illustrations and the quiet pressure of being around people who seemed to have it together. The contract felt real. The problem is that God never signed it.
