Thriving Amid Life's Challenges

You think you have problems?  I suspect you would not trade your challenges for those confronting the Apostle Paul.  Of the 13 books that he wrote, none is more intimate or personal that his second letter to the Corinthians.  In this he wrote, "We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed" (2 Corinthians 4:8-9).  What Paul faced would have sent the average person either into deep depression or flight, but Paul not only took it in stride, he actually seemed to grow with it.