Here is another part of the interview with Dr. David Jeremiah in March/ April 2003 issue of Preaching. Question: “Has your crisis changed how you view suffering and hardship?”

Answer: “If you’ve ever been going through some difficulty in your life and someone comes up to you and says, ‘I know how you feel,’ and if you look at their life and it doesn’t look like they’ve even had one tiny bump in the road, you don’t get a lot of encouragement from that. But there are people who have given me great encouragement. It’s surprising to me the absurd things people say to you when you’re going through something like this. People would come up to me and say, ‘You have lymphoma, right? You know, my sister had lymphoma,’ and then they would proceed to tell me about her suffering and how she died. That happened so consistently. I got to the point where I would stop people who were starting like this and I would say, ‘If this story doesn’t have a happy ending, I don’t want to hear it.’

As a pastor, I’ve learned to not tell people that I know how they feel unless I really do.