The Lord upholds all who fall and lifts up all who are bowed down. The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food at the proper time. Psalm 145:14–15
I don’t know if you have ever tried lifting someone who doesn’t enjoy control over their muscles and limbs? I have when working as a carer. Because they could not cooperate with my attempts to lift them, I was lifting a ‘dead weight’.
It was an impossible task. The psalmist reminds me that I have to cooperate with God rather than assume that God will deliver me from discomforting situations.
We enjoy a real relationship with God, and whilst occasionally I am incapable of cooperating, most times it’s a case of finding the determination and resilience to press on. Having walked with God for over forty years, only recently have I begun to resist my inner angst from deciding my reaction, mood and spiritual condition.
Faced with the unpalatable, I catastrophize my situation and choose panic over faith. Choosing faith offers no obvious road out of my challenge, yet it always directs my gaze back to God, my rescuer.
In my experience, it’s ‘in the squeeze’, when my fears arise and I struggle to maintain a positive outlook, that spiritual growth takes place. It’s my declared ambition to grow up into maturity in Christ, yet I never calculated the reality of how that squeeze would reveal the poverty of my spiritual capacity.
I found I had little more than a series of confident statements that were blown apart in the face of the slightest obstruction. I had to learn to live within the substance of God’s promise, for here alone is the source of that promise, God, to be found.
It’s one reason why reading Scripture is so essential for it is indeed the only food that nourishes faith and carries us into intimate friendship with God. We discover how to live where others fear to tread.
Something to Consider: How difficult is it for you to find God in every situation?
A Prayer to Make: ‘Lord, support me when I stumble and lift me up when I fall.’
Image by Sasin Tipchai from Pixabay
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