My name is Anna Bonds and I’m a senior. I’m en Vista High School. I’m on my way to college next year and I will be majoring in biomedical engineering. I have attended Cherry Hills for seven to eight years. My favorite thing about Cherry Hills is the community, the connections you can make here in all the friends. In my small group, my favorite hobby is definitely running. I could run all day. My favorite food is sushi, definitely, even though I can’t afford it. A bible verse that really speaks to me is Romans five, verse three through four. For we also glory and our sufferings because we know that suffering produces endurance, endurance character and character hope. One thing that no one really knows about me is that my goal is to become a surgeon and spend my life as a part-time medical missionary.

Well, good morning, cherry Hills. Thanks. my name is Anna Bonds. I am a senior at Mount Vista High School, and I’ll be studying biomedical engineering at the University of Miami next year. It is such a privilege to be able to speak to you all this morning. Today I wanted to talk about a topic. I know we have all experienced to some degree suffering. Yes, very fun. But I think that this is a super important topic because one, we all experience suffering. Paul repeatedly says, when you suffer, not if he repeats this in Romans five, Philippians one, two Corinthians four. Second, many people struggle in their faith when they experience pain and suffering. And third, it is during times of suffering that we sometimes hear God’s voice, the loudest in his book, the Problem of Pain. CS Lewis writes, God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.

It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Romans five through four. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance. Perseverance, character and character hope. So how do we use our suffering to build godly character, strengthen our faith, and get closer to God? Well, we all experience pain. For me as an athlete, I have always struggled with injuries. Since middle school, I’ve had four track seasons and five soccer seasons, and I have been injured for every single season except for one sprained ankle, sprained knee, strained calf. I got diagnosed with cancer, which required two surgeries. Junior year, I broke my foot senior year and playing soccer, and I rebroke my foot and hurt some ligaments. So this spring I had have surgery to repair it, and after four years of fighting through injuries and overcoming cancer, this latest surgery finally crushed me.

I’m an athlete. All I wanted to do was compete and I didn’t understand how getting knocked down again and again could contribute to God’s glory. After each previous injury, I worked so hard to come back. I pedaled the stationary bike. I did core, I did whatever I could, and it felt like no matter how hard I tried, I ended up injured again. And I reached a point where I wondered why even try. I kept asking, God, are you even there? I can’t feel you. In Isaiah 43, 2, we are promised when you pass through the waters, I will be with you. And when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned. The flames will not set you. A blaze, God promises me that he’s there even when I cannot feel him. The three most important strategies I found for trusting God to always keep his promises to be with me and my struggles and to use pain for good.

Are these A? Seek God wholeheartedly through scripture. B, seek wise Christian counsel. And C, strengthen your faith through a foundation of logic. And I’ll explain the last one more in a second, but first, we seek God through scripture. How can anyone see how God’s plan will work if they do not know God? Throughout the Bible, we can see how God works, how he moves. And through earner’s study, we can not only grow our relationship with our heavenly Father, but we can slowly align our hearts with his. And when our hearts are aligned, what may have once seemed like punishment can be revealed to be good. James one, two through four, consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance, let perseverance finish its work so you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

When we shift our hearts to align with the intentions of the creator of goodness and love, we can be overjoyed when we see how true goodness and glory to God result from our struggles. I mentioned I had surgery my sophomore year to remove a growth from my shoulder and I was recovering from that first minor operation. Mayo Clinic informed my family that the growth was actually a tumor, a malignant, fibro sarcoma. What’s worse? The margins weren’t clean. There was actually still cancer in my shoulder. After a multitude of CT scans and MRIs and other tests, we learned that the cancer had not yet spread to my liver, lungs, bones, or brain. And this was not an accident. It was part of God’s perfect plan because he loves me and he calls me daughter. He presented a situation I couldn’t handle on my own so I could mature in my faith and learn to lean on him.

So even though the second surgery was much more invasive and painful, part of my shoulder muscles now gone explains my lack of upper body strength <laugh>. But I could fight through that recovery because I had seen the evidence of God’s providence and care for me through the pain that I experienced. I felt God placed a call on my life to pursue a career in surgery. And I don’t know his full plan, but I do know that my trials guided me to how I can serve others through medicine. Sometimes experience and hindsight are what we need to see God’s plan and know he was there the whole time. Second, many people struggle in their faith as a result of pain or suffering. And one of the best ways I found to counteract this is seeking wise Christian counsel. Sometimes we get stuck in a pit of self-pity and doubt.

During my time on crutches this spring, I had lost all motivation to work, recover, or even return to my sports. I had, despite everything God had already done for me fallen into the trap of entitlement. I convinced myself that because I had already struggled so much, I deserved a break and my pain caused me to doubt God. And then I talked to my parents and they reminded me that if Jesus who was perfect, the creator of the universe and God himself didn’t get a pain-free life, what made me think I was entitled to a life of ease? Was it not hypocritical of me to want to pursue Jesus, to become more like him and just skip over pain? Basically, they gave me an outside perspective that humbled me and broke me out of my own wallowing. God designed us to be in a community of believers that our peers and elders can give us advice and encouragement when we need it.

This support system is one of the many tools Jesus provides to aid us in our faith journey. And lastly, God can use our struggles to speak to us. Seeking a relationship with God and strengthening our faith’s foundation helps us to pursue and understand his will. I mentioned using logic to strengthen faith. I know I can trust God’s promises because they’re reflections of his character and his character is consistent across his creation. Romans one 20, for since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen being understood from what has been made. God has blessed me with nerds for parents who taught me apologetics from a young age <laugh>. And so we’re gonna talk a little bit about how the world around us actually points to the loving creator of the Bible. There are four main arguments for God, historical, cosmological, moral, and teleologic.

A few weeks ago, Lee Strobel was here speaking about how his historical analysis of scripture points to its reliability. In his book is God real? He explains the cosmology argument. Other people prefer the morality argument. How could human beings have this sense of right and wrong if someone had not written those laws onto our hearts? I personally love science, the Teleologic argument. So we’re gonna talk a little bit about DNA. At least I’m not the only one who’s excited. <Laugh>. All right, Steven Meyer, a geophysicist from Cambridge University explains in his book that DNA is literally God’s signature in the cell, like an artist signing a masterpiece. He made Ds that we could clearly identify him through his creation. Could DNA have evolved from random chance, just some physics there, splash of chemistry and molecular code? Or is there a divine creator who wrote those sequences with intention?

In every sense? DNA is like a language or a code. Nucleotides act like letters when combined In three letter sequences called codons, they indicate specific amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Each individual gene becomes like a sentence, providing intricate instructions necessary for every aspect of life. The thing about language and code is this, it must come from an intelligent source. Every language can be traced back to intelligence, every code to a coder. Therefore, DNA, just like language and code must have a creator God. What’s more DNA is far more sophisticated than anything we humans have ever made. Did you know that? It can be read in at least four ways that we know of. It can be read forward, backward frame shifted to the right, left and three dimensionally. This would be like if you took the Declaration of Independence and read it backwards and it taught you a lesson on astrophysics, and then you moved all the spaces over by one and you got the US Constitution, and then you crumbled it in a ball and the exposed letters told you Thomas Jefferson’s life story. This level of information, sophistication and compression is not seen anywhere else.

God put so much care and thoughtful design into every single atom and molecule of every single cell of your body. We can see God’s love for us throughout his creation. Then we can have full confidence that he’s bigger than our struggles. He fine tuned the universe for life to thrive so we can know He loves us enough to be with us through pain and to you suffering for good. Because nature displays intricate purpose and intelligent creator, God is the most reasonable cause. My purpose in geeking out about DNA is this. Sometimes it feels like God isn’t there. Sometimes the pain is enough to make you want to quit, but we can know through logic and research that he is there. His creation points to his love for us. Look at the sky. It’s designed to keep you alive. Rainbows are symbols of past promises God has kept.

Every breath is a miracle to show you that he’s there and he signed his name and every cell of your body. So know that God is there and listen for him because he wants that relationship with you. Two Corinthians four, eight through 10 and 18, we are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed but not driven to despair. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed through suffering. Our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies. So we don’t look at the troubles we see now. Whether we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen for the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.

So when struggle comes, I want to encourage all of you to seek God in scripture, in Christian community and in his creation so that you can be comforted knowing that he’s right there with you, orchestrating everything for his goodness. Let’s circle back to Romans five. We know that struggle creates perseverance and character, but sometimes we forget that the most important aspect of struggle is hope. Through the hope of Jesus Christ, our savior, we can endure our struggles because we know they are temporary. Right now, we are just running the race. Our lungs are burning. Our legs may be tired, but we will reach the finish line and fall into our father’s loving arms and it will all be worth it. Thank you.