Quote from the devotional book, Streams in the Desert, by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman:
“There is no way of learning faith except by trial. It is God’s school of faith, and it is far better for us to learn to trust God than to enjoy life.
“The lesson of faith once learned is an everlasting acquisition and an eternal fortune made; and without trust even riches will leave us poor.” —Days of Heaven upon Earth
Faith Is Not Self-Taught
There is a sentence in today’s Streams in the Desert that captured my imagination: “It is far better for us to learn to trust God than to enjoy life.”
Far better. Not equally good. Not a consolation prize. Far better.
That is either one of the most liberating things ever written — or one of the most troubling. Possibly both.
The devotional is plain about this: there is no way of learning faith except by trial. You cannot read your way into it. You cannot absorb it by proximity to people who have it. You cannot manufacture it in seasons of ease, any more than you can develop sea legs on dry land.
This is not pessimism. It is a description of how the thing actually works.
A muscle only grows under resistance. A navigator only learns to read the stars when the coast disappears. And a soul only learns to trust — really trust, not merely affirm faith while sitting in a comfortable pew — when trust is the only remaining option.
God’s “school of faith,” as the devotional calls it, has a syllabus that no one would choose for themselves. The coursework tends to look like illness, or loss, or waiting without answers, or watching something you love fall apart while you take your hands off and trust God with the outcome.
Two Lives, One Question
This is where I found myself asking an honest and perhaps uncomfortable question.
Consider two believers.
The first is born into a stable family, marries well, raises healthy children, gives generously, and moves through life without any defining catastrophe. No child buried. No diagnosis that rearranges everything. No season of poverty or mental unraveling. A genuinely good life, and a genuinely good person.
The second is born blind. Or loses a child young. Or lives inside the fog of depression for decades. Or watches a marriage dissolve despite every effort to hold it together.
Both are faithful. Both love God. But one has been enrolled, involuntarily, in a much more demanding school.
The devotional suggests that what is learned in that school — genuine, tested, unshakeable trust — is an everlasting acquisition and an eternal fortune made. Not just useful here. Eternal. Carried forward. Which raises the question neither of us can fully answer yet: what does that mean for the next life?
Treasure That Travels
Jesus spoke more than once about laying up treasure in heaven — a currency accumulated here that holds its value there. He praised a widow whose offering was objectively tiny and proportionally enormous. He described a grieving, destitute Lazarus who owned nothing at all in this life — and was carried directly to Abraham’s side (paradise) in the next.
It seems that what looks like loss from the outside may be, in the economy of eternity, something closer to investment. That doesn’t make suffering romantic. It doesn’t mean God engineers tragedy as a productivity tool. But it does suggest that the person who has been broken and rebuilt – who has trusted God in the dark and clung to Him – has developed in ways that will matter beyond this life. And perhaps in ways we cannot yet calculate.
The Danger of Easy Comfort
The quote closes with a warning that deserves to sit with us: without trust, even riches will leave us poor.
A life of uninterrupted comfort is not automatically a life of deep faith. It may, in fact, be the more spiritually precarious life — not because suffering is required for salvation, but because ease can quietly convince us that we are self-sufficient. That we are, in some operational sense, doing fine without God. The person who has been stripped of every other option and learned to trust anyway has something that no amount of generous charitable giving can produce on its own. They have been somewhere. They know something. Their faith has a texture that only comes from being tested.
A Word for the Weary
If you are in the harder school right now — if you are in the season that nobody chose — let this be said plainly:
What you are learning is not wasted. It is not incidental. It is, according to this old and sturdy devotional, the most important acquisition a human being can make. An everlasting one.
The lesson of faith, once learned, is never lost. Not here. And not, it seems, beyond here either.
That does not make the classroom comfortable. But it does make it worth attending.
Source: Streams in the Desert by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman. The quoted passage in today’s entry is attributed to Days of Heaven upon Earth.
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you have brought up a very good details , appreciate it for the post.
Many thanks! Faith can be a tough lesson, but so valuable! God bless you.