I’ve been battling with a title for this post but I just couldn’t think of one so please feel free to assign to it a title of your own.
Being a Christian is amazing. Knowing that there is a God, who is also a Father, Friend and Comforter, that cares about every detail of your life and longs to protect and bless you is pretty awesome (hallelujah). However, there are those times where we wonder, ‘can You even hear me? I’m sinking, save me!’ Those times aren’t fun and they probably happen a lot more than we are comfortable admitting but I’ll be real, my whole year thus far has felt like that. Regardless of this, I wouldn’t be comfortable labelling this year a ‘bad year.’ Even though things haven’t gone the way I would have liked and I wish God would have saved me FROM the storm, I truly see His hand IN the storm.
From about July till this moment in time, I’ve been a lot more consistent (I still need help though, Lord knows!) with the word and prayer. If my year hadn’t panned out the way it did, I’m very sure I would have been comfortable in mediocrity with Christ. That’s a danger zone by the way. Sometimes we get so comfortable in our blessings that we forget He who blessed us. Imagine that! We use what He has given us as an excuse to cut God out of our schedule, just like Adam we shout ‘it was the job you gave me, it was the husband/wife you gave me, it was the business you gave me’ and so on. Anyway, this is a topic for another time.
Many places in the Bible refer to God as a ‘strong tower’ which the righteous can run in to and be safe (Proverbs 18:10) and tell us that He will neither leave nor forsake us (Deuteronomy 31:6). These verses are very encouraging and make us want to dance but one thing I have come to realise is that towers were a defensive strategy in times of battle. Meaning God is our defensive strategy IN the storm and IN the battle but not necessarily from it. Don’t get me wrong, there are many times He saves us from situations -both seen and unseen – but the testing of our faith is what produces the endurance needed to make us perfect and complete, lacking nothing (James 1:3). When we fail to understand that God is there with us in our struggles and heart breaks, instead of running to our Strong Tower, we run to things which will eventually destroy us. If you aren’t running to God, you’re running away from Him. Some of us run to food, sex, drugs, alcohol, blame, insert your weak tower here. We run to these mere illusions of safety and wonder why we feel worse or things become worse. Then we have the CHEEK to blame God and withhold our praise, stop praying, some even turn to worship other gods. All because we think God is slow or uncaring.
Don’t let anybody deceive you, Christianity is not a promise of an easy life, it’s a promise that a loving God will be with you during the hard times. It’s a promise that if you draw near during these challenges, you’ll have peace, insight and reassurance. You see it so often that people who claim to not believe in anything, seem to reach a point in life where they ask for intercession on their behalf for frivolous and/or selfish things (not always but I’ve seen it often enough), this shows me that their issue is not that they don’t believe in the power of God, their issue is that they think the God of Christianity is a genie and want His benefits but none of the sacrifice or tests that may come. If only we understood that just because we have challenges in life, it doesn’t mean God doesn’t love us, isn’t there or doesn’t care, we would have so much more peace and our walk would not seem like such a burden but more like the beautiful journey to being more like Christ that it is.
In scripture we are told to fix our eyes on Jesus, this means to have a steady unwavering focus. Why? Because storms are distracting, there is noise and with noise often comes fear. Fixing my eyes on Jesus reminds me of when I was younger and had to get an injection so the doctor told me to look at a poster of Hulk Hogan – I really liked wrestling growing up – low and behold, I didn’t feel the needle! Fixing our eyes on Jesus doesn’t mean there won’t be a storm, it just means our focus is on something bigger and greater than the storm.