How dare I try to write something helpful about the Russian school massacre? Perhaps for this reason. On Monday morning November 15th, 1965 I went to work leaving my wife and 2nd daughter Margaret aged 2 at home. Later that morning Margaret was terribly scalded through an accident and went to heaven 6 days later on the Sunday. That evening I stood before a large congregation in our church who were praying for Margaret’s recovery. Inspired by the history of Job, who lost 10 children in 1 day, I quoted his magnificent words. “The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” [ Job 1:21 ]

Nearly 40 years later our eyes soon fill with tears when we remember Margaret’s death. But O how comforting were the promises of God to us in the Bible at that time, especially the one that says, “We know that all things work together for good to those who love God.” [ Romans 8:28 ] We are still proving this to be true.

Now I am aware that our sorrow caused by an accident was nothing compared with the deliberate killing of children at Beslan that has horrified the world. This terrible slaughter confirms God’s diagnosis of the human heart that it is, “Deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, who can know it?” [ Jeremiah 17:9 ]

In the book ‘The Hiding Place’, just before Betsie Ten Boom died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944, she said to her sister Corrie, “We must tell them what we have learned here.” Her emphasis was not on what they had suffered but on what they had learned! They knew God was not an arsonist trying to destroy them, they believed rather that He was a refiner whose loving aim was to purify their faith. A prayer. “Lord help me to believe that sorrows can be part of my education.

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