Tears of Sorrow, Tears of Joy by Stan Goss (2024)
Rising from a childhood laced with devastation and heartbreak, Stan Goss found immense inward healing and earthly successes with the Lord as his companion. Tears of Sorrow, Tears of Joy shares his journey of conquering hardships while also fully grasping the nature of both pain and joy, and shares his vibrant passion and strategies to inspire spiritual elders to fully live out their crown of glory years.
Stan is a Master Executive Coach, community leader, family man, and passionate servant of the Lord devoted to inspiring Christian spiritual eldership. He serves on the Board of Trustees for The Bible Seminary (TBS) and is one of the first Bible Certificate graduates and oldest living alumni.
“I remember myself as a youngster riding in the passenger seat of our pick-up truck with my father at the steering wheel. We were following my uncle Grady, who was driving a flat-bed truck with a tractor chained to the flatbed. Right in front of our eyes, he drove off the road into a ditch and the tractor broke loose and pinned him in the cab. The scene was horrific. My dad left me alone with Uncle Grady to search desperately for help. Pools of blood remain ingrained in my memory. These, and that Uncle Grady died. I think he was thirty-something. That’s all I remember.
Sometime thereafter, I was out fishing with my grandpa, Oscar Lankford. My memories of him, along with the pictures I have seen, depict him as a tall, quiet man. He was sort of the “Gregory Peck” type. Yet on this day, my memories become fuzzy. My grandpa had a heart attack and died. The story is that I dragged his body into the pickup truck and drove to the nearest farm for help…
The nightmare continued when my dad, Claude Benton Goss, died a few weeks later. We were alone on the tractor night plowing. I think he had a heart attack. I do remember my mom yelling at him to wake up. He didn’t. I remember an ambulance driving away with his body, and that was it.”
“Many events conspired to bring me into the next dark day of my life. I was working one morning when the phone rang for me. My mom greeted me urgently, informing me that both she and Nancy had the flu.
“Could you call in sick for us?” she asked.
I agreed and phoned my mother’s work and Nancy’s school. I then raced to the house, checked in on them, and fixed them a bite to eat. They were sick, but seemed stable, so I returned to work.
A few hours passed. Later that afternoon, I called the house and received no answer. I assumed my mom and Nancy were feeling better and read this as a positive omen, imagining perhaps they stepped out to shop…Later, when we arrived home, the phone was blaring. I answered it only to hear a neighbor’s frantic voice urging me to rush to the house. I arrived within minutes to a sea of flashing red lights and several emergency vehicles. When I stepped inside, I saw my mother’s limp body on the floor and a gurney was wheeling Nancy outside and into an ambulance. It was all a blur after that.
I know that someone directed me inside the ambulance with Nancy, and that I spent the night alone at the hospital as people worked feverishly to save her life.
But Nancy didn’t make it. She was only fifteen years old. Authorities determined that the house was flooded with carbon monoxide gas. Evidently, my mother pulled a panel off the furnace that kept the gas from recycling into the house. Without this panel in place, the house became a lethal gas chamber. We never knew how or why this happened.”
“A few years ago, a lovely lady, Mary Bell, posed an interesting question to me, “How did you get this way?”
What a blessing of a question! How did I go from a talented young boy, deeply and profusely wounded by the deaths of my closest family members and leaving a massive heap of anguish and rubble behind, to arrive as such a man in such a prosperous place?
Yet, I knew the answer, and quickly: Only by God’s grace. No other answer could attempt to make any sense at all. I couldn’t begin to claim credit for the outcome of my journey. God has just brought me along for the ride. But the astonishing tales of His grace never end, and in my case, there is more to this story.”
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