{"id":5396,"date":"2026-04-28T08:18:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T12:18:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5396"},"modified":"2026-04-28T08:18:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T12:18:12","slug":"help-in-the-storm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/28\/help-in-the-storm\/","title":{"rendered":"Help in the Storm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast<\/em>,\u00a0click here<\/a>
\u00a0
Stuart Briscoe and his wife Jill, who are natives of England, came to America some years ago to help launch\u00a0a new congregation\u00a0in the Midwest.
\u00a0
They had been in the States only a short while when they made their first trip to Chicago to\u00a0attend a conference.
\u00a0
Briscoe’s car was low on fuel, but he was confident\u00a0there would be plenty of\u00a0gas stations in the downtown area.\u00a0
\u00a0
He was wrong.
\u00a0
He ran out of gas in the middle of a thunderstorm, in the fast lane of one of Chicago’s infamously traffic-clogged\u00a0interstates, right in the middle of rush hour.
\u00a0
He had no idea what to do.
\u00a0
He stepped out of the car, and immediately his suit was drenched.\u00a0
\u00a0
“To their credit,” he later wrote, “the people of Chicago did not ignore me.\u00a0Everyone rolled down their windows and told me exactly what they thought about me, even though they didn’t know who\u00a0I was.”
\u00a0
Among the cars that rolled past was a beat-up old sedan.\u00a0The driver of that car yelled something, too, but Briscoe had long since stopped listening.
\u00a0
He waited for something to happen.\u00a0But for the longest time there was just the verbal abuse.
\u00a0
Then, suddenly, the same beat-up old car was coming by again.\u00a0It stopped.\u00a0The driver hopped out, opened up his trunk, produced a gas can, and poured it into Briscoe’s tank.\u00a0He put the cap back on and turned to walk away.
\u00a0
Briscoe shouted, “Hold it!\u00a0 What’s going on?”
\u00a0
“No speak English! No speak English!” came the answer.\u00a0The driver of the beat-up car did speak a little English, and Stuart discovered that this man had seen his plight, gone off the freeway, found a gas station, then gone back onto the interstate going the other way, gotten off, then back on again, winding his way through traffic to where the Briscoes were stranded.
\u00a0
He turned out to be a Puerto Rican who had been in Chicago just one week.
\u00a0
Most importantly, he knew what it felt like to be a stranger, to be a newcomer, and to be standing there needing help.
\u00a0
The apostle Paul wrote movingly about the power of empathy and compassion.
\u00a0
He and his missionary comrades had almost suffered death in the city of Ephesus, barely escaping the wrath of a mob infuriated by their advocacy of this strange new god named Jesus.
\u00a0
\u201cWe were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure,\u201d he wrote to the young church in Corinth, \u201cso that we despaired of life itself.\u00a0\u00a0Indeed, we felt we had received the sentence of death\u201d (2 Corinthians 1:8-9).
\u00a0
But God was in it, he concluded.
\u00a0
The Lord, whom he described as \u201cthe God of all comfort,\u201d \u201ccomforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God\u201d (2 Corinthians 1:3-4).
\u00a0
When we are in the midst of crushing circumstances, it may seem as if our suffering is meaningless.
\u00a0
But God is the ultimate spiritual alchemist. He can transform the lead of our present pain into the gold of future encouragement for someone else.
\u00a0
Who is able to empathize with someone devasted by abuse? Someone else who has been abused. Who can comfort someone who has lost a child? Someone else who has suffered that unimaginable loss. Who can grasp the shock and humiliation of being financially swindled? Someone else who knows exactly how that feels.
\u00a0
Ask God today to touch you with a\u00a0special sensitivity to someone else\u2019s pain.
\u00a0
By his grace and power, we can help another person\u00a0make it through the storm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0Stuart Briscoe and his wife Jill, who are natives of England, came to America some years ago to help launch\u00a0a new congregation\u00a0in the Midwest.\u00a0They had been in the States only a short while when they made their first trip to Chicago to\u00a0attend a conference.\u00a0Briscoe’s car was low on fuel, but he was… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5397,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[826,157,44,112],"class_list":["post-5396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-comfort","tag-compassion","tag-empathy","tag-suffering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5396"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5398,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5396\/revisions\/5398"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}