I have never heard any Christian ever say in my life.

I have really gone deep with God on the bright, sunny, easy days of life.

What I hear all the time is I have really gone deep with God in the hardest days of my life. What I hear all the time is I have really gone deep with God in the hardest days of my life.

It's strange, isn't it, how the worst seasons in life can end up being the ones where God feels

the most real. I'm Dan Kroover. In this episode of Light and Truth,

John Piper helps us see that pain isn't just something we survive.

It's usually where we find the God who never leaves us.

This message was originally delivered at the Bethlehem Baptist Church Youth Retreat in the winter of 2004.

I read this book a few summers ago.

Flags of Our Father's about the Battle of Iwo Jima in the Second World War.

Let me read you the story of Jack Lucas.

Now he didn't do everything he should have done, probably not a Christian.

This is a symbol.

Iwo Jima is an island about eight miles across,

600 miles south of Japan in the Pacific Ocean, and in World War II, it had two

air strips that America needed to end this grisly Second World War. Twenty-one thousand

Japanese guarded this island. Our Marines decided we must take the island. On February 19, 1945, 800 ships for a little

eight-mile island. Eight hundred ships with tens of thousands of Marines converge on this island.

They get in their Amtraks, which were these little amphibious deals,

that take them from the boats to the coast, and they move on Iwo Jima. And for one month, it took them one month to take the island,

6,800 teenagers died on those beaches. I say teenagers because most of them were 18, 19, 20-year-old Marines, just recruited

in a couple of years earlier. So just a couple of years older than most of you. Six thousand

...