All for Good

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to His purpose.” Romans 8:28

Can good come from the bad in my life? Will I ever see it? Will I ever know?

The 1960s saw much bad in our nation. Discrimination, riots, injustice. One African-American boy was not allowed on the school bus with whites. His parents complained, and school officials relented. But the white children did not relent. They beat up the poor boy who only wanted to ride the bus. After that, a policeman had to escort him to school.

Report of this incident spread all the way to a newspaper in the Soviet Union. Soviet citizens ridiculed our nation for its cruelty.

But the boy’s story helped one person. A little Soviet girl named Natasha was beat up on the way home from school. Not because of her skin color, but because of her faith. Her parents were Christians.

Natasha’s grandmother decided something had to be done. She cut the article about the American boy out of the newspaper and took it to school the next day.

“I will not permit such humiliations against Natasha to continue.” she said. “...Just look at this article! Do you realize that the discrimination experienced by a child from a Christian family in a Soviet school is quite similar to the discrimination against blacks in the United States? Unless I hear from you today that you guarantee Natasha’s safety at school, I will be forced to demand that a policeman accompany her to school, just like that black boy in America.”

The black boy in America probably never learned the results of his suffering, but a little girl had peace from persecution for a time all because of his story in a newspaper half-way around the world. I wonder what God is doing with my story today.

To learn more about Natasha, read Children of the Storm: The Autobiography of Natasha Vins.