In this heartfelt episode, Wally Long shares his incredible journey of loss, resilience, and redemption. After a series of personal tragedies, Wally turned to faith for strength and answers, leading him to write ‘Why Me, Lord? Biblical and Practical Answers for Suffering in Our Lives.’ In Part 2 of his conversation with Angie, Wally tackles the causes of suffering, offering insights on how they shape our lives and how we can endure and find meaning through adversity.
00:15:18 Wally Long’s Story of Suffering and Faith
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Welcome to The Good News with Angie Austin. Now with The Good News.
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Hey there, friends. Angie Austin here with the good news. Well, did you know that men are like waffles and women are like spaghetti? Well, that is what Bill Farrell says. His book is Men Are Like Waffles, Women Are Like Spaghetti. And now we had two of you last time, Bill. Do we only have the waffle today?
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We’ve only got the waffle. I’ll do my best to represent the spaghetti side, too. But today we’ve just got the waffle.
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And this book is not just men are like waffles, women are like spaghetti, understanding and delighting in your differences. So give us the overview, the premise of the book and how we understand and delight in our differences.
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So first of all, this book came out of our desire to help both men and women understand relationships a little bit better because it’s a lot easier to get women to talk about relationships than men. So we were looking for a word picture that would engage the men and And we were carrying the thought, men like food, so maybe a food analogy will work. So if we were to diagram the way typical man processes information in life, it looks like the top of a waffle. There’s a bunch of boxes. All those boxes are separated from one another by walls. And the way we as men operate is the first issue in life goes in the first box, second issue goes in the second box, third issue goes in the third box, and so on. And we as men, we spend time in one box at a time and one box only. Yes, so true. Yeah, so when a man is at work, he is at work. When a man’s out in the yard doing yard work, he is in the yard doing yard work. And when a man’s focused on his relationship, he’s focused on his relationship. When we do one thing at a time, and we do it well, because of that single focus that us men have, we actually are problem solvers by nature. So we like to go into a box, figure out the problem, assign a solution, and then move on. And if we get to a box and we see the problem, we don’t know what the solution is, we just move on. And as men mature, we do jump boxes faster than we used to.
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Yes.
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And so at times it looks like we’re multitasking, but we’re just jumping from one box to another faster than we used to when we were younger.
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I see.
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And so it’s really valuable because… Like the family needs that single focus that us men bring. The workplace, the church, the community, they all get value from this single focus that us men bring. But it does create some tension in our important relationships because you ladies don’t process the same way. And so how does the spaghetti work? you ladies process more like a plate of spaghetti. Like if you look at a plate of spaghetti, all of the noodles touch every other noodle on the plate. Yes. And so you ladies literally can connect everything in your life together at the same time. So you can move from noodle to noodle to noodle to noodle from thought to thought to thought seamlessly. And as a result, you’re really great at multitasking. But you can actually connect all the stuff going on in life. And so It’s not unusual for me to watch Pam. She’ll be on the phone with a girlfriend. They’ll be talking about life. She’ll be recommending your show to her while they’re talking. And while she’s doing that, she’s making a to-do list for herself and for me and for all of our kids. And she’ll be telling the kids in sign language to quit talking because she’s on the phone and they’re interrupting her. And she’s got dinner going on the stove, and she can open and shut the oven door with her foot. It’s amazing to watch her.
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That is hilarious because yesterday my daughter is a junior. She was doing a Skype phone call with a coach, and it went on for like an hour for a potential college to go to for volleyball. So my husband is doing the call with her, and I’m on the porch to stay out of it with all the pets, but there was a cat inside staring at me outside, right? So the cat’s meowing at me. So instead of just like saying one second or just getting up while my daughter’s talking or getting up, you know, at some point in the call or putting your finger up like I’ll be right back and putting the cat out. He’s texting me like, oh, my gosh, help. Like, get the cat out. Oh, my gosh. And I’m like, right. It’s like the cat’s 10 feet from you.
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You can’t go dealing with a cat.
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No, the cat’s not in his waffle square. It’s in a different square. Exactly. All right, so I know we’ve spoken in the past, and I wanted to maybe focus on Chapter 6 and 7 where you talk about waffles and spaghetti in conflict and waffles and spaghetti achieving together. Or we can also start with some of the main issues that you tend to see people having that you think you can help with.
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I think the conflict is a good one to jump in on because we all know life brings challenges. Right. And as a result, you have to address issues in your life. And when those issues hit and they’re important, they hit men and women differently. And so what happens when there’s conflict in a relationship, the best way to describe the way you ladies approach it is the alarm goes off. Like studies have shown that the alarm system for important relationships was placed in females. So when something’s not right in a relationship, when something’s not right in the family, when there’s something like kind of brewing that needs to be addressed, you ladies sense it. And in fact, the alarm goes off. You will start bringing up issues. Like studies show that women are the first people to bring up issues in relationships. And so the alarm goes off. And as men, we get confused by it. Because when we hear our wives talking about what’s going wrong either in our relationship or in the family or there’s something that needs to be addressed in our life, it sounds to us like you have it all figured out. You know what you’re supposed to do. You know what we’re supposed to do. You know what the kids are supposed to do. And we then feel like we’re behind. So you’ve seen the problem. You’ve seen the issue. We feel like we’re behind, so we get defensive. And when we get defensive, it sets off the alarm even more. You’re like, oh, look, he’s being defensive. And so something must really be wrong. And so then the conversation ramps up. The wife is bringing up more issues. The man is being defensive. And we get caught in these crazy cycles. And if a couple can say, okay, these are supposed to work together, because the alarm system goes off in the wife, men have this problem-solving ability And if men will engage at that point and say, okay, the alarm’s going off, we’ve got to figure out what it is. What we have noticed working with couples is when couples know what the real problem is, they’re really good at addressing it.
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Okay.
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But too often, they just run in the symptoms. Like, Pam and I, we were at a hotel not too long ago, and in the middle of the night, the hotel alarm went off. And everything’s buzzing, everything’s loud, and we come out of a deep sleep trying to figure out what’s going on. And I walked over to the thermostat. No, no, that’s not what it is. And I checked the phone. No, that’s not what it is. But the alarm’s still going off. And it turned out that in one of the laundry rooms, there was smoke coming out of one of the appliances. Okay. And it set off the fire alarm for the whole hotel.
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Oh my.
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Well, once we knew what the real problem was, we could relax and realize, Oh, it’s not our room. Yes. Yes. And we were able to coordinate. Well, that same thing happens with couples all the time. Like I’ll, I’ll tell you in our relationship, my relationship with him, if we’re in conflict with each other and I started it, it’s almost always because I’m feeling left out.
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Oh, interesting.
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And that feeling of being left out, it comes from two things. One, I’m the youngest in my family. So I grew up feeling like I was minimized all the time.
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Ah, yes.
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Because everybody else, you know, the youngest, it’s cute when they have an idea.
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Yes.
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And everybody says, okay, we’ll think about it and get back to you. And I’d be like, no, I know what we should do here. And so I always felt like I was kind of just being put in the back seat and You know, being under-considered when I brought up ideas. And, of course, I married an older sister because we need to have our butts pushed in life. And so I married somebody who’s decisive and direct. Yes. And she’s really good at it. And the other thing that it ties back to is my mom. My mom’s a very broken soul. And she was mistreated a lot as a child. And her reaction to it is she just took control as an adult. And every decision that was made in my home growing up was made by my mom. And it was made with some basis of fear to it. So I didn’t feel like I was allowed to make decisions growing up. So when I, you know, now as an adult, I’ve married a decisive woman and she’s very smart, very talented. And sometimes she will just make a decision and then tell me that we made the decision.
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Oh, how funny.
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On really mature days.
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I’ve done that, too.
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I’ve done that, too. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s humbling because most of the time it’s a good decision. But I’m feeling left out of it. Interesting. And on mature days, I will tell her that. Like, Pam, I’m feeling left out. Can we revisit this? But on less mature days, I will just, you know, kind of snarkily say, wow, it’s great to be married to a bossy oldest sister. Yeah. Which never goes over very well, but I try it every once in a while anyway.
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I love it. Yes, that’s so fun. I think I’ve done that before where I’ve made a decision where I’ve brought it up to him, but then it’s complicated. I want to avoid the extra hassles, per se. And so I just kind of take care of it. like on my own, because I feel like I’ve, I’ve, I kind of did that with the dog where I said, I am going to get a dog for my birthday. Like it’s going to happen. I’m getting a dog and that’s that. And just so you know, and it was like, it’s going to add value to the family and everybody’s going to love it. Oh, Oh, well, now they’re best friends. It’s ridiculous. But when I got off the… And I didn’t want to bring… So I didn’t want to bring it up on the trip because we were out of town, the kids and I. And I said, Dad knows, but I don’t want you bringing it up because he’s not necessarily on board. But I have told him, right? So then we get off the plane and he’s waiting for us at the curb or whatever. He’s like livid because who’s going to take care of it? And who’s going to do this? And who’s going to that? Oh, and who’s going to bring it to his office two days a week and drive around with his truck in it and snuggle it at night? Oh, who’s going to do that part? So anyway, they end up being best friends now with like matching sweaters, you know, but but I did actually just I couldn’t lie. I filled him in. He wasn’t on board. I let him know that I am going to do this, you know, and maybe it’s a little bit different thing we’re talking about. But I think sometimes I do it to avoid conflict because I know I’d eventually convince him, but I don’t have time to convince him. Yeah.
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And see, that’s the kind of thing. The argument’s not about the dog. Yes. The argument’s about the process. Yes. And the approach. Yes. And again, if couples can get to where they see the real problem, most people are intelligent enough and they’re in love enough that once they see the real problem, they band together and address it together. Yes. But couples spend so much time on the symptoms, rolling around in the reactions.
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What are some of the biggest things that you think, I mean, finances, obviously, I’m assuming, are, I thank goodness I’m on the same page with my husband when it comes to money.
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Yeah, and the behaviors are generally not the problem. Like finances don’t tend to be the problem. Finances are the stage that exposes the problem. So things like fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of not being taken seriously. I don’t want to be controlled by another individual. I want there to be freedom for me to be who I am, not just live under your expectations. Like those are the real issues that cause problems in marriage. And they show up in planning. They show up in finances. They show up in parenting. But the finances, the parenting and the planning are not the real issues. It’s Do I have freedom to be who I am? Because as an individual, you are who you are. And you organize your life to give you freedom to be the best version of yourself. Well, then you get married and you merge your life together with somebody else. And that leads to the other thing that I would say is one of the most common struggles in marriage is people lose their curiosity. Because we tend to view our differences over time as problems. There’s something wrong with my spouse because they do things differently, so I need to fix that.
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I want to have you and Pam back again. I love having you guys on. It’s just such an interesting conversation. We’re out of time, so give us your website, will you?
SPEAKER 05 :
Sure. It’s love-wise.com, so L-O-V-E-W-I-S-E.com. And we’re trying to park ourselves on the corner of love and wisdom so people know how to stay in love.
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I love that. Okay. Men are like waffles. Women are like spaghetti. Bill and Pam Farrell. Thank you, Bim. Thank you, Bill. Have a great day. Hey, Bim. You guys are the couple, Pam and Bill Bim. All right. Thanks, friend. Bye-bye. We’re merged into one now. Yes. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
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Hello there, friend. Angie Austin here with the good news. Really excited to have Wally Long back. Wally was my first guest on the show about 12 years ago when I was just starting off the good news with Angie Austin. And you may not think his story is a good news story, but it is in the long run because the Lord has stood by him and his extended family, his very large family with many, many kids. through all of this pain and suffering. The book is Why Me, Lord? Biblical and Practical Answers for Suffering in Our Lives. And Wally, we’re going to talk about Chapter 2 today because we’re working our way through the book. But for people who haven’t heard you on my show the prior five or six times, give us kind of a recap of what you’re talking about when you talk about suffering in our lives and yours in particular.
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Certainly. It started in 2006 when my youngest sister at 40 years old committed suicide. Then the spring of 2007 or the summer of 2007, I had a son, 17 or 18 at the time, that had a motorcycle accident with a barbed wire fence, lost his right leg. Several surgeries and I came home from the hospital two weeks later. Then my mother went to the hospital on her deathbed and died in September of 2007. And then just as our family was kind of getting back to normal from all of that, In March 1st of 2011, my brother and his wife were murdered by their own son, who was 12 years old at the time. They almost killed his younger brother and sister, who were five. The girl was five. The boy was nine. He almost killed them. They survived. We adopted them, and they became our seventh and eighth children.
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Oh, my goodness. And then, of course, the other kids your brother had, you’ve taken them in the fold as well. So how many kids total now is this? Thirteen?
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Well, they had seven. Yeah, they had seven and not counting the one who did the deed. So there will be six left that we have a relationship with besides our six. There will be 12 kids altogether.
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And you mentioned that you visited the then 12-year-old. He ended up going to prison, but he’s out now. He was a juvenile, and he was charged as a juvenile. So he’s been released from prison after just over a decade. Yes.
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Well, he actually just did seven years. Oh, goodness.
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He was released in 2018. Oh, my goodness. I feel sick about it. So he killed his parents, almost killed Sarah and Ethan. And I remember it was so touch and go that they took them into emergency care, and they didn’t know if Sarah and Ethan would make it. They did. Sarah just graduated with honors and received all these scholarships. And you guys homeschooled your kids until just a few years ago for Sarah, but the rest of them you homeschooled. Strong Christian family. So was your brother’s family, the 12-year-old who was the— The shooter or the murderer, I just say it’s just so hard to even talk about a 12-year-old that way, but who’s been released. He also was a churchgoer with the family, and no one knew there was an issue this big within the family.
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That’s right. We never had a suspicion at all that anything like this was happening.
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All right, so let’s get into Why Me, Lord? Biblical and Practical Answers for Suffering in Our Lives. We started with Chapter 1 last week. What’s Chapter 2 about? What are we going to learn this week?
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In Chapter 2, or Part 2, essentially, Part 2 includes five chapters, because in Part 2, when we ask Why Me, Lord?, essentially we’re asking two questions. We’re asking, one, what causes our suffering? Why did something happen to cause our suffering? And then part three, we look at the purposes of our suffering. So part two, in those five chapters, we look at the various causes that essentially probably would include just about any cause that might cause our suffering and tragedy. So this part right here deals with the causes.
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All right, I’m just hopping back. You do talk in part one about how trials are a normal part of life and that not all trials are equal in our response to those and that these trials are bearable as the Lord stands with us. So then as we get into part two, I just want to just kind of just give an overview here because this is interesting as to what causes our suffering. It can be our own foolishness. It can be caused by our sin or the sin of others, caused by the enemy, caused by storms that fall on everyone, trials and tribulations we all deal with, and can be the result maybe just of living in a fallen world. So let’s start with our own suffering caused by ourselves.
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Right, and that’s essentially the law of sowing and reaping that Paul talks about, that Job talks about. And, of course, anybody who’s ever planted anything knows that when you plant a seed, you get from that seed exactly what you’re supposed to get. If you plant green beans, you get green beans. If you plant sinfulness or you plant foolish decisions or unwise decisions, you often will suffer for those. Anybody who’s ever had to file bankruptcy and financial straits knows that often, not all the time, but sometimes that happens because of your own unwise financial decisions. You know, I work with a group of people that are coming out of drug addictions, and they know this principle very well because they planted their own sinfulness and foolishness by getting addicted to drugs and staying there for a while. And even though they are recovering and they are moving forward with life, some of them suffer long-term consequences of their behavior. It may last forever, even to the point of changing their brain chemistry and and causing other health issues that they will deal with for the rest of their lives. So sometimes we just do unwise things, sinful things, foolish things, and we suffer for it.
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Boy, do we. All right. And that’s something that, as you know, with our kids, it’s very difficult because sometimes what happens to them is so, I mean, I hate to use this as an example, but my mother-in-law, her father was a police officer and he died in a motorcycle accident. Then grandpa, my father-in-law, got in a really bad motorcycle accident. Your son lost his leg in a motorcycle accident. My son has been told, period, you may not have a motorcycle, period, ever. We don’t drive them. We don’t do that. Both grandpas said we don’t ride motorcycles and we don’t get tattoos. Both grandpas told him. But when they become adults, it’s up to them, right? And so if he decides to— And so we can give him all the examples in the world, but ultimately it becomes his choice. He called us the other day and asked if he could get his ear pierced. He was at Young Life with a bunch of Christian kids, and kids were getting their ears pierced, and he was getting really pressured. So my husband said, no, not while you’re at this event being pressured at Young Life. My daughter did it. She’s a freshman going to be a sophomore. He said, you’re old enough. You’re 15. You can get your ears pierced. Fine. My son, he’s 18. He said, I want you pierced. to not do it tonight, but if you want to do it tomorrow, then we’ll go and pay to have it done. But I want you to think about it and not do it while you’re being pressured. So when he got home, he said, yes, he got home. He said, I’m so glad you said no, because they were really pressuring me to do it. And I didn’t feel like I had a way out. And so we just said, you know, yeah, you can do it, but not tonight. So dad became the bad guy and it helped. That’s good. Yes, exactly. That’s the way it should be. So foolishness, what we see as foolishness, our kids may not see as foolishness, which is definitely an interesting teeter-totter in life. All right. old nephew of yours killing his parents, your brother and sister-in-law, and almost killing Sarah and Ethan, his brother and sister. That was suffering that was caused by a person that now the entire family has nothing to do with this kid who’s become an outcast from all of his siblings and all of his relatives, from everyone that knew him before.
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Right. And a lot of the suffering that you read in the papers you see on the news is caused by the sin of other people. It’s caused by sinful, evil people who doing sinful, evil things to others. I worked in a federal prison for 20 years, so I saw that over and over and over again. Sinful people that caused other people to suffer. I worked at the Supermax in Florence, Colorado for a number of years, and there were rapists, murderers, and every person that gets murdered, not only does a person lose their life, but it changes and affects the lives of everybody that loved that person. So one person does an evil deed, and then many, many people can suffer for it. We look at the story of Joseph in the scripture, and I deal with this in the book in a couple different places, but Joseph hadn’t done anything wrong, but he suffered and went to prison and was a slave because of the sinfulness of his own brothers, the jealousy of his own 11 brothers that didn’t like what he had to say to them about his dream, and they sell him into slavery. And then he went through a journey that Eventually, God blessed him. He ended up on top of the world, you know, in the Egyptian world, second only to Pharaoh. But he suffered because of the sin of other people. And that’s probably one of the biggest things that we see in this world. Sinful people are evil. They do evil things. And then we suffer the consequences of it. Innocent people suffer the consequences.
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All right. And again, we’re talking about Wally Long’s book, Why Me, Lord? And we’re talking about part two, our suffering caused by the enemy and by the storms that fall on everyone. Some things we just can’t avoid.
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Yes, right. We have an enemy as Christians, as people. We have an enemy in this world, and he’s God’s enemy. He’s Satan and his evil horde. And they want to make us fall. He wants to see us crushed under our storms, under our hard times. And if he can bring something into our lives, and not every time do we suffer. Obviously, not all of these causes we can pinpoint in each of our suffering. But sometimes our suffering might be caused by an enemy who simply wants to make you fall. And then storms. Shortly after we brought the kids to our house, There was a tornado in Joplin, Missouri that killed several hundred people. There were good people, bad people, rich people, poor people, black people, white people, people of every color and every race and every creed that suffered because of a storm. It’s just simple. When it rains, we all get wet. When the tornado comes, we all get blown by the wind of that tornado. Sometimes storms just fall, and when they fall, people suffer. And then, of course, the last one is, in a sense, is maybe a catch-all, but we live in a fallen world. We live in a world that has been affected now for thousands of years, depending on your view of the age of the earth and when God created the earth and all that, which is a debate for another time, but But we live in a world that for thousands of years, for millennia, has been affected by sin. And sin, there are many devastating effects of sin. The genetic defects that people are born with that suffer through life because of a genetic problem. And then that causes other people hard times in the lives of others around them because they have to shift their life around. And we do it out of love. We care for people. We love somebody. It doesn’t matter what genetic problem they may have, but it does cause a change of life. And so sometimes just this fallen world, bad things happen because the world is a bad place. It’s, it’s evil. There’s evil in this world. And, uh, sin has affected this world in numerous ways. And sometimes our suffering is simply caused by that fallen world. And, uh, I know that’s not encouraging. And this chapter essentially isn’t, this part essentially isn’t meant to be meant to be encouraging necessarily. It’s, It’s simply trying to define that one of these five causes is probably what caused your suffering, our suffering.
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And determining that kind of sets us up for what to do in the future, whether we need to change our behavior or eliminate someone from our lives, change course in friendships, etc. And then we’re going to go into, during our next visit, Why Me, Lord?, into section three, and we’re going to talk about the purposes of our suffering and how God shows himself and strengthens us and reveals our character to ourselves and others, because others can learn a lot from how we react to this, as you’ve seen, because you’ve done so many interviews and so many speeches and you know, sermons, you know, talking to people who have learned from, you know, what you’ve gone through. If you want to find Wally, he has a website. It’s WallyLong.com. And the book is on Amazon as well, if you want to get Why Me, Lord. And just always a blessing to have you on the show, Wally Long, Why Me, Lord, Biblical and Practical Answers for Suffering in Our Lives. I’m honored, too. Thanks, Wally.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you, Angie. Appreciate it. Thank you. We’ll talk to you again later.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thank you for listening to The Good News with Angie Austin on AM670 KLTT.
