Reflecting on his 3 years spent as a doctoral student in the speech department at Penn State University (aka “Happy Valley”), Bob Merritt (When Life’s Not Working) states they were the unhappiest years of his life. Periods of joy were intermingled with fears, depression, and poverty.
Today when people ask him how he made it, he responds: “It was simply the belief that God had led me there and that eventually all the hard work would pay off. I didn’t know how or when, but I believed that if I hung in there and did the hard work first, the payoffs would come later.”
At one point during this ordeal, his mother-in-law offered succinct, encouraging advice: “Bob, the days are long, but the years are short.” Bob didn’t realize it at the time, but those 3 short years helped him to understand how to communicate God’s truth to a secular society. Through persevering and suffering well, God can transform us during our Land Between.
2 Corinthians 5:7- “We walk by faith, not by sight.”
