So they appointed taskmasters over them to afflict them with hard labor. And they built for Pharaoh storage cities, Pithom and Raamses. But the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and the more they spread out, so that they were in dread of the sons of Israel. The Egyptians compelled the sons of Israel to labor rigorously; and they made their lives bitter with hard labor in mortar and bricks and at all kinds of labor in the field, all their labors which they rigorously imposed on them. – Exodus 1:11-14.

At the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, “ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI?” which is translated, “MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?” – Mark 15:34.

Experience – Sets You Apart

In December, 1960, Fidel Castro proscribed religion as a counter-revolutionary dogma no longer tolerated in Cuba. Twenty-three-year-old Armando Valladares couldn’t believe the decree. On Christmas Day he went as usual to pray in a nearby church. Three days later the government arrested him for “offenses against state authorities.” Thus began a twenty-two year horror, while he endured the shocking cruelties and tortures of Castro’s prison system.

Valladares survived the nightmare through his faith in God and his love for a girl who befriended him while in prison. The chastisements inflicted to break him deepened him instead. Poetry and paintings that anti-Castro accomplices smuggled from the prison revealed an unconquered soul within a beleaguered body. Finally, after intensive lobbying in world capitals for Valladares’ freedom, the Cuban government released him.

The personal affliction of that Cuban hero sets him apart from us. Only he knows what it cost him. Likewise, no one ever can ever understand our Lord’s ordeal. Only he assumed the burden of a fallen race, whose swollen egotism had inflicted horrendous plagues on itself. Only he accepted the penalty for those iniquities, as he absorbed God’s belligerence towards sin. The sufferings of Jesus place him in a category all alone. He endured more than anyone in all of history. No one else has any idea!

Applicable Quotations

There is many a profitable good lesson to be learned by experience. – Henry

Not what happens to a man.  It is what a man does with what happens to him. – Huxley

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success.  We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery. – Samuel Smiles

Is there any one so wise as to learn by the experience of others? – Voltaire

Courtesy of Speaker’s Sourcebook of New Illustrations by Virgil Hurley copyright © 1995 by Word, Incorporated. Used by permission.
*Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.
**Quotations are Public Domain.