Pushing through the pain, rising above the circumstances. Enabling Grace II

They say that if you are to going to learn to run a marathon, you have to learn to push through the pain. When you do this, they say (I have never done it), you get your second wind and can carry on. The physical is an analogy of the spiritual. There are rare individuals who in spite of severe odds, and extreme suffering, seem to find the wherewithal to rise above it all, and even to excel. And they are an inspiration to us all. I say in spite of it all, but actually I suspect it is at least partially because of it all. I keep saying it, the difficulties of life are crossroads. But where do they, where do we, find the strength and the courage, the wherewithal to take this less traveled road? It is not easy for anyone, but the Christian has resources the non Christian cannot know. In particular when we come boldly to the Throne of Grace we will find "Mercy and Grace to help in time of need" (Hebrews 4:16 quoted last day).

I have seen it over and over that suffering prods us into one of two directions. We can allow our suffering to build character, fortitude, integrity, grace, wisdom, love, hope and the like, or else we can allow it to leave us bitter, cynical abrasive and the like. To say this another way, we either allow these things to draw us closer to God, or we allow them to push us further away. We may vacillate between the two for a while, but ultimately we go in one direction or the other. And we choose. We choose to continue to see ourselves as victims, or we choose to see ourselves as over-comers. We need God's help to take the latter path. Well I at least need His help. I cannot do it without Him

The day that without doubt was the most difficult of my life, the Lord woke me up with an ancient hymn on my heart and mind:

Oh Joy that seekest me though pain,
I cannot ask to hide from thee.

I trace the rainbow through the rain,
and feel the promise is not vain,
that morn shall tearless be.

This was the day that my (now ex) wife took the four children and left. It was not the way I wanted to deal with our problems, but she had had enough. As conformation that the hymn was from Him, He next reminded me of the verse in Hebrews 12:2 “Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame....” He was showing me that pain is a barrier the other side of which, is joy. But I did need to look to Jesus. He is (was) my strength and my song. He had earlier promised “Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). There were many things He did for me that day (and afterwords) in addition to speaking to me from His Word, He sent people along to pray for and comfort me, and He gave me in my spirit, what I needed to get through it.

In one of His parables (the unjust judge - Luke 18:1-6) Jesus taught that we aught always to pray and not give up (verse 1). There were times, long periods in fact, that I was not able to pray, at least not in intelligible sentences. I am grateful for the teaching from Romans 8 that at such times “the Spirit intercedes for us in groaning that cannot be uttered” and my prayers were often little more than “Aggggggg”, or “Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God!” or “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy (Abba - Father God). There were times when it all got too much for me and I fell, but He was always waiting for me to pick me up, and slowly but surely He built me up, and healed what I thought were incurable wounds. Indeed there were times I cried out with Jeremiah “Why is my pain perpetual And my wound incurable, Which refuses to be healed? Will You surely be to me like an unreliable stream, As waters that fail?”

In the days before running water on tap, an unreliable stream was one that would dry up at the time you needed it most. He did not tell us that we would never feel like we were abandoned, He did tell us that in reality He would never leave us nor abandon us. As the “footprints in the sand” poem illustrates clearly, in such times He carries us, though again we may not even be aware of it (Google "Footprints in the sand"). And the sun does come out again. It does.

The parable in Luke 18 ends with “When the Son of man comes again will He find faith on the earth?” (verse 8). Though we may stumble and fall, many times over and over and over, what is important is that we keep coming back to Him, calling out to Him from our darkness. Unless we do this, we will fail to obtain His enabling Grace (Hebrews 12:15), but if we have come to know Him, and have tasted His comfort, then like Peter we will ask ourselves and Him “Where will we go Lord, You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). As for me, I know that without Him I would quite literally be dead. Where will you go? Why don't you go there now?