1 Peter 4:12

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal which comes upon you to prove you, as though something strange were happening to you.

We are creatures of habit. One of the oddest things about the way people behave in crisis situations is that they very frequently do nothing at all. A few years ago at an air fair in Germany, two planes collided and crashed in flames on a crowd of spectators. The odd thing about it was that videos of the disaster showed an amazing stillness in the crowd for several seconds after the crash. People simply couldn’t believe it was happening to them. The message of the cross is that such things do happen to good people, even to great people, even to divine people. This does not mean that God is capricious, any more than he was capricious with himself when he surrendered himself to be crucified. Rather, it means that, because he handed himself over to death, there is no ordeal we can go through where he is not with us and we with him. Stay with him and he will refine you like gold tested in fire.