Beware of Your Strength

A friend is in the midst of a trial that blind-sided her. She said, “I don’t understand. Am I doing something wrong? How do I get in messes like this? They seem to follow Image result for image of strength me around. What have I done?”

My understanding and perspective are limited, but I told her that her problem was her big heart. She is involved in the lives of others who have big needs, and she lays down her life to see that their needs are met. When there are complications for several people at once, it becomes overwhelming to her.

Her selfless love for those in need is amazing. It is an admirable strength that has blessed many people. But her strength also gets her in trouble.

Many of our struggles arise from our strengths.

Have you known someone who is really smart and gifted in learning but has a hard time believing something if they can’t understand it? Sometimes their intelligence keeps them from stepping out in faith to trust Jesus with a situation—or their life. Their strength becomes their stumbling block.

Likewise, I’ve known people who are skilled at stepping into any situation and serving. They instinctively know what to do to help out. But if they aren’t careful, they will be helping someone else while their own family is in need. Their gift creates problems because at home the service becomes mundane and they get special joy in serving others.

Or the big-hearted person that invests in an individual to help them get their life in order and ends up drawing that person to themselves rather than to the Lord. Instead of helping them become established, they develop a co-dependent relationship that is not healthy for either of them. And it all started with a genuine desire to help.

I’ve known several elderly people who become very fearful when they are weakened by age and physical challenges. It surprised me because the fearful ones had been strong, independent, I-can-take-care-of myself individuals as adults, whereas the seemingly weaker individuals don’t become so fearful.

I wonder if the problem is that the I-can-take-care-of-myself people never really learn that God will take care of them. Could it be that the strength of those strong individuals becomes a troubling weakness?

Then there is the strongly self-confident person who has few friends because it seems he thinks he is always right and won’t listen to anyone else. And yet, isn’t it a strength to be self-confident?

Our strengths are a gift from God, and they are given so that we will use them to bless others and strengthen the body. But we need to beware of our strengths. They can lead us into trouble if we aren’t careful.

First of all, we need to realize that they are from God. If we take credit for them, we’ll become proud and will be less appreciative of the gifts that others have. Consequently, we will think too highly of ourselves and look down on others.

Second, we need to submit our strengths to the lordship of Christ. If we seek Him about when and how to use them, He will guide us, either opening more opportunities to use them, or leading us to say no so we won’t be stretched too thin. He will give grace for the work He has prepared for us.

Third, we need to use them as a way to serve God and others, not expecting acknowledgement or reward from man. If we—and our strengths—are surrendered to the Lord, He will reward us (1 Cor. 15:58; Col. 3:23-24).

Forth, we need to be willing to walk in our weaknesses rather than in our strength. It is in our weakness that His strength is most clearly made known (2 Cor. 12:9). If we seek to hide our weaknesses and only engage in activities that use our strengths, we are denying God the opportunity to work through us.

When we do that, we are missing much of what God has for us in life. By not depending on God to work through us when we are weak, we do not experience His grace and faithfulness or the joy of living as His child. There is tremendous joy in seeing God use you when you go beyond your abilities. It builds deeper faith and confidence in Him (2 Th. 1:11-12)..

Denying opportunities that require us to walk in our weakness also limits the opportunities for God to use us for His glory. If we work in our strength, we get the glory, not God. If we acknowledge the Lord in the process, He can get the glory, but if we are weak and dependent on Him, God will be glorified and others will be drawn to Him.

Use, develop, and enjoy the strengths God has given to you, but beware, they could trip you up when you aren’t expecting it.

From Joy to Perfection

What do you want your Christian walk to be like? In other words, what do you want God to do in your heart and life as you walk with and serve Him?

I want to reflect the heart of God. I’d like to grow in righteousness, peace, joy, and holiness. I’d like to have a Image result for image of sunset servant’s heart, and move in the power of the Spirit, and more.

But, it seems the things I want to do, I don’t do, and the things I don’t want to do, I do. I’m hopeless without the Lord working through me.

Indeed, are we not all hopeless unless the Lord does the changing within us?

While studying faith, and considering the testing that is part of a faith walk, I bumped into a secret of growing in the Lord and into His likeness. It’s not new. The verses are common to anyone who has spent much time in church or in the Word, but it hit me in a new way.

The secret is in James 1:2-4. “My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience. But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”

That’s what we desire, right? Would you like to be perfect, complete, and lacking nothing? That takes in righteousness, peace, joy, love, and all we desire.

But what were the conditions that lead to our goal?

Testing and trials? Hmmm. Counting it all joy when we go through the trials? Patience?

You’ve heard the saying, “I don’t know why God tests my patience, He knows I don’t have any.”?

What does patience have to do with anything anyway? And how do you “count it all joy” when experiencing trials that threaten destruction? How can we count it all joy if life is spiraling out of control?

Did you notice that James tells us to “count it all joy when you fall into various trials”? If we fall into them, they were not part of our plans, and often beyond our capacity to handle them.

The only way to have joy in the midst of such is to realize that we don’t have to be in control, because we know the One who is sovereign over all. We lose our joy when our faith in Him wavers and we think we have to maintain control.

There are various reasons why we feel the need to control. We may think we have to have all the answers—or strength, or grace, or whatever is needed in the situation. We may be so overwhelmed or distracted by the situation that we don’t even think about God’s faithfulness to lead, guide, and provide when we depend on Him. Or, we may unconsciously feel that it’s too big for God to handle, or that we know what’s best.

I have never had the thought, “Oh, this tragedy is a gift from God to answer my prayer. He’s giving me what I’ve been asking for. Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! I’m going through this so I will be perfect, complete, and won’t lack anything!”

We don’t tend to quickly rejoice when we encounter trials. We usually see His faithfulness more clearly when we look back on suffering, and there are times we never understand His purpose.

If we don’t have patience for things to straighten out, we tend to get in a dither trying to fix them. However, if we have faith that God loves us, has a plan for our lives, and wants the best for us, it gives us forbearance and expectancy to see how He will provide.

After all, He promised that “all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose” (Rom. 8:28), so we can rest in Him with confidence through the storm—if we love the Lord and are called by Him.

With that confidence, we can even rejoice in His faithfulness and can learn patience by focusing on Him and His desire to make us perfect, complete, and lacking nothing.

A book could be written about the fact that we won’t be perfect, complete or lacking nothing until glory because we were born with a sin nature. However, we are in Christ and He is in us. He is perfect, and lacks nothing.

As we draw from Jesus, it is ours too. We are complete in Him. Our problem is that we tend to rely on our own resources.

It’s through the trials that we are driven to Him. Therefore, let us rejoice.

When speaking of a trial when God seemed distant, Bob Mumford said, “I praised God with the praise dripping off my chin.” He chose praise when he did feel it.

If we choose to count it all joy when we are assailed with trials—even if joy drips off our chin—it will turn our hearts toward God. That will give us grace and strength to draw from Him. It will increase our confidence and faith as we realize that we aren’t alone in the trial.

Through Him we can walk victoriously. In Him and through Him, we can learn patience and be perfect, complete, and lacking in nothing. Because He is in us and we’re in Him, we can be more than we are.

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you (1 Thess. 5:16-18).

Now may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 15:13). And may you grow to be perfect, complete, and lacking in nothing.

Finding Hope in the Midst of Darkness

James* was doing well in his rehab program. His mother, Sue*, was hopeful that this time it would succeed. She was working to tear down the defensive walls she’d erected around her heart, trying to not always be on her guard, always measuring his words and actions. Maybe, just maybe, he could return to a productive life and not have to go to prison. (*Names are changed.)

But the last visit with him was unsettling. James talked and acted strangely. He wasn’t himself. It was reminiscent of the time she had to call the police on him because she feared for her own safety. But he was also kind, gracious, and generous. It didn’t make sense. Uncertainty kept the walls in place that day.

Then the call came. James had acted strangely at work. Details were scarce, but he was in a mental hospital for evaluation. Involuntary admission. Needed clothes. A saw was mentioned. Did he cut himself?

His response didn’t help, “It wasn’t too bad. I wrapped it up and kept working.” But then the cops came and took him away? Sue was left with more questions than answers.

However, within twenty-four hours James was evaluated and released, apparently not deemed a threat to himself or others.

But that was quickly followed by a phone call in which James cursed his mother out. He made it clear—with liberal use of foul language—what a bad person she was and how she’d let him down.

When Sue told James she would hang up if he kept using bad language, he cursed her, snapped, “Don’t worry about it,” and hung up.

A worker at the treatment center heard James’s side of the conversation and confronted him. After their talk, James called to apologize.

It was good he apologized, but it wasn’t convincing. Her conversation with the man who had spoken with him that evening gave further understanding, but she was far from convinced that everything was ok.

She had been questioning how she would know when it was safe to allow him back in her home. Now this happened. I talked with Sue several times throughout the drama with James, and I could see her defenses going back up. And with reason.

Sue is a single mom. Her husband died when James was a baby. After the phone call, she knew she couldn’t allow him to come home or even drive him to WalMart for needed supplies on her next visit. She was afraid to be alone with him.

As we chatted about the situation, about James, his well-being and what it meant for the future, everything seemed uncertain and bleak.

Then, the picture began to change.

In the midst of the darkness, it was mentioned how fortunate it was that the aide heard James rant on the phone and had confronted him immediately. The Lord was good to arrange for someone to hear and confront James, so things could be resolved more quickly.

The worker also said everybody at the center likes James. In addition, he affirmed her words and actions and said she was being a good mom. Furthermore, the Lord confirmed that her perceptions of her son were accurate.

The longer we talked, the more we saw the Lord’s hand in the events that had unfolded. We saw that God had been with Sue. He had her back.

She was not alone. Indeed, God had led her through everything.

I got excited as evidence of the goodness of God unfolded. Likewise, I could hear Sue’s voice change as the light invaded the darkness that surrounded her. Her tone became hopeful, confident, and maybe even a bit excited.

Nothing changed in the situation. Things remained uncertain with James because he was still not himself. The need for caution lingered.

And yet, everything changed, because Sue had hope and confidence. The walls weren’t torn down, but it was not all up to her. Sue was no longer alone in the drama.

Everything changed because our eyes were opened to see that the Lord was with her. She wasn’t alone. God was taking care of her.

Psalm 146:9 says that the Lord supports the fatherless and the widow. Sue knows that verse. It has been a mainstay of hers for years. But she needed to be reminded of it in the midst of the trial.

I share Sue’s story (with permission) because I need to be reminded—and think we all do—that Jesus said He’ll never leave us or forsake us, “so that we [can] confidently say, ‘The Lord is my helper, I will not be afraid. What shall man do to me?’” (Heb. 13:5-6).

Sometimes a situation catches us off guard because it comes suddenly. Other times, it descends so gradually that we don’t even realize we are walking in darkness.

It doesn’t matter what the situation is, whenever we realize that we are without hope or we have erected walls of defense, we need to ask the Lord to open our eyes to see Him.

The Lord is always our hope and salvation. He is faithful.

If, and when, we waver in the midst of darkness and despair, we need to ask the Lord to open our eyes so we can see His goodness. When we see the Light, hope rises.

“O Israel [Christian], hope in the Lord; for with the Lord there is lovingkindness [covenant faithfulness]” (Ps 130:7a).

Mama Said

While in high school, I worked as an assistant to a professor from Emory Dental School in Atlanta. He enjoyed teaching, but Dr. Bartholomew missed patient interaction, so he contracted with our family dentist to use his office on Saturdays. I was his receptionist and assistant.

I liked working with Dr. B. The atmosphere was pleasant and peaceful. However, there were days when it seemed nothing went right. For example, when filling a difficult molar, Dr. B had to practically stand on his head to work. He was challenged because dental equipment was not made for left-handed dentists back then.

I don’t remember other problems, but I know they existed, because I remember his response when they’d pile up. He’d quietly sing, “Mama said there’ll be days like this. There’ll be days like this, my mama said!” from “Mama Said,” a song released by The Shirelles in 1961. He never sang anything else. That song told me he was stressed.

Fifty years later, I still occasionally think about “Mama Said” when facing unexpected difficulties. It came to mind a few days ago when a friend shared with me. Jeanne’s day was filled with challenges that were in her space and needed to be addressed, but they were outside her jurisdiction, so she couldn’t do anything about them.

The song came to mind when she told me about her drive home. She turned on her blinker to signal a right turn. Instead of the blinker, the windshield wiper started. Her reaction was, “What in the world!” After a moment of consternation and confusion, she realized she’d used the wrong lever. She’d turned on the wipers, not the blinker.

She stopped for fast food in route. When she pumped ketchup into the little cup that’s provided, it came out really watery and kinda’ brown colored. “Ooooh, yuk. What’s wrong with the ketchup?”

Then she saw she was pumping tea, not ketchup—and that an employee saw her mistake. Jeanne chuckled and told her, “You can tell your co-workers what I did so they can laugh too, but please wait until I’ve left so they won’t look at me!”

And I’m thinking, “Mama said there’ll be days like this.”

Problems of wipers coming on instead of blinkers and tea in the ketchup cup quickly turn into a laugh that relieves tension. However, that’s not true of all interruptions or challenges.

For instance, a friend’s plumbing has been stopped up for two weeks and the plumber can’t find the blockage. A house across the street burned down the day after Christmas, and a young wife discovered uterine cancer resting next to her baby when she had her first ultrasound—all recently.

We never know what a day will bring.

We can count on most days having some kind of challenge. The question is not IF it will happen, but how we will deal with the unpleasant surprises that interrupt us.

Having expectations that life will always be smooth and go like “I” want it to leads to frustration, anger, and shaken faith when the unexpected happens. Emotional eruptions short-circuit the brain, making it more difficult to deal with the situation. Dr. B’s singing was probably his way to calm down and embrace the day, so he could make the best of it.

If we have Jesus, we should be able to navigate “days like this” with greater grace, because we have more than a mama who said it. God warned us and also told us what to expect. The Bible says the righteous will suffer many afflictions, “but the Lord delivers him out of them all” (Ps. 34:19).

Jesus warned us of tribulations and persecutions. (Mark 10:29-30, Jo. 16:33). Paul said he is “well content” with weaknesses, insults, distresses, persecutions, and difficulties “for Christ’s sake, for when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Cor. 12:10). If Paul experienced bad days, we can expect them.

Paul said not to be disturbed by afflictions, for “we have been destined for this (1 Th. 3:2-3) and reminded us that we conquer through Christ, and nothing “shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:35-39). Stress and unexpected interruptions don’t have to ruin our day if Jesus is with us—but we may need to remind ourselves that He is there all the time.

James takes it a step further. He encourages us to “Consider it all joy . . . when you encounter various trials” because through the testing of our faith we gain endurance that we may be “perfect and complete, lacking nothing” (Jam. 1:2-4).

It’s good for a mama to warn that there’ll be days like this, because they do happen. However, it’s even better to have a reason to hope and rejoice in the midst of frustration, hardship, uncertainty, pain, and whatever else the world might throw our way that makes our day “like this.”

Jesus warned us so that we can have peace in the midst of our difficult days. “These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33, emphasis added).

In Him, we can overcome our days like this.

Robert & Kay Camenisch encouraging and equipping relationships