Archive for Crisis
8 Important Things to Know During Hard Times
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We all live in a world cursed because of sin. Part of the effect of that curse is hard times, difficulty, pain, and sorrow. I so wish I could tell you that Christians don’t have to go through any difficulties, but the Word of God contains story after story of believers in difficult times. Paul and Peter in prison, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Stephen being stoned, believers being persecuted, the very life of Jesus, and I could go on and on. And this list applies to all storms whether we caused them, Satan sent them, or God designed them. In a moment, I am going to share my list of eight things you should know about hard times but before I do that I need to give you some foundation.
Why You Must Go Back
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God’s ways are mysterious, beyond my understanding and often seem downright contradictory. While in my humanity, I prefer to think in straight lines which lend themselves to defining a goal as completed, a task marked off, I find that God’s ways are usually not pictured best by straight lines. They are paths which appear, at times, intertwined, difficult to map out, going forward, then backward, orbiting around a center, and often perplexing my human mind. The longer I walk with God, the more clearly I see that He is truly not confined to my limited understanding. He is working, often His deepest purposes in me, when I am clueless.
This week, I was meditating on two of the seemingly contradictory ways of God. In the next few days, I want to explore these two thoughts:
1. You must go back.
2. You can never go back.
Huh? Sounds confusing? I hope you are intrigued sufficiently to continue reading for both statements are true and I am not being ambivalent. There are times in life when you must absolutely go back. You must go back, as it were, in your mind, your emotions, your relationships, to moments of the past and experience the moments again. There are some very important reasons for us to go back. And in other ways, we must never go back and in fact, cannot do so, but that is for another day this week.
My Bridge Over Troubled Waters
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In 1969, Paul Simon wrote a powerful song which he and Art Garfunkel recorded in 1970. The expression of Paul’s heart in the song conveys the message that he would be a friend when friends could not be found; that he, himself, would be a bridge over his friend’s troubled water.
I was so struck by this thought yesterday as I listened to a lovely lady share how she had endured so many difficult things, felt alone so often, but God had revealed to her through a prayer team at our church that He had been her bridge every time over those troubled waters. She had not, in fact, been alone. God was there.
How many times have we felt abandoned during our hard times? And truthfully, many people do abandon us, but one thing I have begun to ask God in the last couple of years is that He would show me where He was during dark moments in my past. I, too, find that He has been my bridge, and that often the way He has done that was through others as they became “bridges” for me to walk on. My heart was moved to write these thoughts…
The Bridge
I hear the water below me
The power of its rushing
Stirs the fear within me
Yet the other side
Beckons me to keep walking
This bridge under my feet
Gives me strength
Although it doesn’t completely
Take my fears away
Encounters of the God Kind
Posted by: | CommentsSo pants my soul for You, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?
The Quest
Posted by: | Comments“It’s a curious thing about quests, isn’t it, Mr. Quirk?” she said. “The seeker embarks on a journey to find what he wants and discovers, along the way, what he needs.”
I put the novel down.
It was one of those moments when I realized that something significant was about to happen, if I’d pause long enough to let it. If I would stop long enough to get the impact of the words.
The words tumbled within me. I felt drawn to them; to ponder them; to absorb more than their surface meaning.
The paradox of it struck me. Yes, how often do I, do we all actually, pursue something we want only to find that what we really need is quite different indeed? But somehow we are unable to find it without the journey itself which often proves rocky, curvy, dangerous, and on a surface glance, absolutely undesirable.
We have a goal, a desire, a drive. We aim at it. We head toward it, often in the only way we know how, but somehow, almost mystically along the journey, its pull on our hearts disappears. We find, in a way that looks to be accidental, what our hearts really needed.
How can it be that when we find ourselves in the darkest situations, “Yea, though I walk through the valley…” where the shadows are all around us, “of the shadow of death…”, and we initially feel our goal is just to get out of this awful place, that suddenly we can experience God along the way, “I will fear no evil…”, finding that He is with us? “for He is with me.”
Welcome to My Journey
