Sharing Your Pain - Lydia Sexton

1799–1894

She must have felt like Job. Lydia Sexton bore more than her share of pain, as one relationship after another was torn from her. When her father died, Lydia and her siblings were parceled out to various relatives. She married at age twenty, but her first husband died in a fall, leaving her with a young son. Feeling ill equipped to care for her child, she gave him to a wealthy couple and visited him weekly. A few years later she remarried and relocated for her new husband’s job, but he soon died too, and now she had another son. She fought to get her first son back, and she succeeded, but she found the boy had been neglected and badly injured in a household accident. Fortunately, God had a third husband for her, and this marriage lasted some fifty years.

But Lydia’s struggles weren’t just due to tragic loss. She fought to find her spiritual footing in the midst of these crises. The early 1800s offered a broad menu of religious experiences for the seeker, and she tried several different churches. She landed at a United Brethren church that felt like home. “Although I had not a relation on earth that would join the church with me, I soon found fostering fathers and nursing mothers there.”

The church discovered her gift for speaking, and they encouraged her to do more of it. Though she refused at first, she soon was licensed to preach. In this role, Lydia traveled throughout the Midwest for several decades. At age seventy, she took on a new task, as a chaplain at the Kansas State Penitentiary. Here she used not only her speaking skills, but also her knack for organization to build a thriving ministry.

Perhaps it’s appropriate that the final act of Lydia’s too-tragic life involved ministry to people shut away from relationships and often forgotten. Her own pain might have enabled her to understand theirs.

It’s tempting to think that your struggles disqualify you for God’s work. But the tragedies you have faced, the temptations you have fought, the turmoil you have muddled through—God can use it all.

God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us.

2 Corinthians 1:3-4