The Worst Year Of Your Life

Hudson Taylor, missionary to China, had a profound experience with Jesus. So profound it would impact and fuel the rest of his life as a missionary. Taylor found Jesus all satisfying. He would be tested in 1870.

 Many of us can look back to what we consider the worst year of our lives. 1976 was that year for my mother. Her grandmother, my great grandmother, died that year. She and Momma were very close. Later that year my four year old sister died in a drowning accident in a pond while my mother slept. Momma worked the night shift as a nurse and cat napped during the day while watching my sister also. She worked hard trying to make ends meet as a single mother of three. She never got over my sister's death. I think she carried immense guilt. Momma was not a Christian at that time. She did not know how to cope with the painful events of that year.  She would not be saved for many years.

Hudson Taylor had a very difficult 1870. It was the worst year of his life. First, the year started out horribly as his young son Samuel died in January. That in and of itself would be a devastatingly crushing blow for most. In July his wife gave birth to another boy. The baby boy they named Joel died two weeks later. Later that same month his wife Maria died of Cholera. Three deaths in his immediate family in seven months. To make matters worse Taylor, a still relatively young man, had four other children to try and raise alone.

How did he cope with such sorrow? How did he survive the worst year of his life? He found Jesus all satisfying. All satisfying in life as well as in death. All satisfying in triumph as well as in sorrow. All satisfying in marriage as well as a widower. Jesus not only sustained Taylor, but He also exchanged His divine life for Taylor's mortal life to live, love, and serve through. The exchanged life between Jesus and Taylor became the source of Taylor's strength in overwhelming grief.

Each of us will have a worst day and a worst year of living. If we have learned what Taylor did, that Jesus is all satisfying in every season of life, we too will endure. We too will press on to see better days and better years.

Taylor remarried later on. His second marriage survived for over three decades. He had two more children. God blessed his missionary work in China. The point is that good years and God's blessings can follow the hardest years of life. And if that does not happen down here on earth, it most assuredly will for the saved in heaven. The same Jesus who proved all satisfying in life will be abundantly more so in eternity. In hardest years of life as well as through all of eternity.