Saturday, February 22, 2020

When we are weak, He is strong.



  “Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you except such as is common to man; but God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will also make a way of escape, that you may be able to bear it.” (1 Cor. 10: 12-13)

  I am embarrassed to say that the article I am sharing with you is from an author whose name I don’t know! It is not because he wishes to remain anonymous but because I made a copy of what he wrote in his book many years ago to share with my pastor and didn’t write down his name or the name of his book! But it is so good I hope you will read it and be encouraged by it as I have. (If anyone recognizes the author please let me know so I can give him the credit he deserves!)

   “I’ve been thinking about weakness a lot lately. I’ve been thinking how often I am not strong, not successful, not together, not “victorious,” but instead how I am weak, just barely surviving, how easily and fast I could fall. And lately I’ve been appreciating the virtue of simply surviving. 

   This hit me strongly when I spent the day at the hospital with my son. Nothing too serious; he had fractured his thumb playing lacrosse and needed some pins inserted so the bones would align and heal correctly. It was an outpatient procedure, minor surgery—in and out in six hours. 

   But it was an intense day for me. Twelve years earlier I had been in the hospital with Trevor, that time because he had been diagnosed with leukemia. Then he was just six years old, maybe 40 pounds. Now he was a strapping six-foot-one, 190 pounds, driving, shaving, answering his own questions for the doctor. He was a leukemia survivor. 

   After the hand surgery, groggy from the anesthesia, his hand in a monster cast—Trevor couldn’t button or zip his pants or get his shoes on. As I helped him dress himself, it was just like a dozen years earlier, helping my little guy dress after a surgery that had installed a pair of mainline catheter ports in him. I wheeled him out to the car just like the last time, my son the leukemia survivor. 

   So you can imagine how precious the word survivor is to me. The word describes me, too—all of us, in fact: Christian leaders, pastors. We are not that strong. We’re not that successful. At best we’re all just survivors. Like Trevor, we’ve got some amazing stories to tell, some scars to show for our survival.

   Most pastors know all about surviving. Only a pastor truly understands what it feels like to have yet another person call to tell you they are leaving the church—a person you love, a person you helped and served, a person who needed you, a person you feel you now need, and yet the person is going, leaving, abandoning, rejecting. You know the talk: ‘You are not feeding us pastor…I’m going where I can get more meat, not just milk.’ People go, and they take a chunk of your heart with them. And of your morale. And with them goes some of your naivete. Somehow your survive. Sometimes just by a fingernail, sometimes weak, usually scarred. But you survive.

   Only a pastor truly understands what it feels like to fire someone you have discipled, someone you have trained and encouraged and then brought onto your staff, but who didn’t last, no matter how much you tried to help them. Then the ex-staffer feels you turned on them, betrayed them, and soon members of your congregation assume the same. And you play it over and over in your mind, and you can’t imagine how you could have done any better. But that knowledge doesn’t keep  you from feeling miserable and weak, not just for a week or two, but for months.

But you survive. In 2 Corinthians 1:8-10 Paul writes:

   “For we do not want you to be ignorant brethren, of our trouble which came to us in Asia: that we were burdened beyond measure, above strength, so that we despaired even of life. Yes, we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves but in God who raises the dead, who delivers us from so great a death, and does deliver us; in whom we trust that He will still deliver us,”

   In other words, Paul says,  ‘I was weak, but I survived.”

    I remember Trevor’s days 12 years ago—constant hospital visits, sleepless nights, anguished prayers, painful spinal taps, bone marrow aspirations, nightmarish side effects from drugs, weakness upon weakness.  Yet Trevor survived. And so did we.

   I remember the two or there years I spent not long ago; preaching every week, but wondering whether my own faith would survive. It did. And now I identify with other of Paul’s words in the same letter:
    
   ‘But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us. We are hard-pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed---always carrying about in our body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body. For we who live are always delivered to death for Jesus’ sake, that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh…….. Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we do not look at the thing which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporary, but the things which are not seen are eternal.’ (2 Corinthians 4:7-11,16-18)

   Pressed, perplexed, persecuted, abandoned---its amazing what we survive, as weak as we are. And it is also amazing to look back and think, I have been renewed day by day. I’m back. I survived.

   Whatever siege or nightmare or failure you’re going through now, try to imagine this: someday you’ll be looking back, 12 years will have passed, and you will have survived. You are a survivor.

   And when you see others struggling and stumbling and falling, don’t distance yourself from them or their weakness. Don’t miss the point by condemning them. Empathize instead. Draw close. Like Augustine, identify with your weak brother or sister, because you are no different. And believe that just as you have by grace survived ‘many dangers toils, and snares,’ they can survive too. For we serve a God who says: ‘My power is made perfect in weakness.’ (2 Corinthians 12:8)”

PRAY

1.    Lord thank You for walking with me through every trial and temptation. Thank You for never leaving me nor forsaking me.
2.    Help me to look back and remember how many times you have put me on Your shoulders and helped me to survive.

3.    Help me to look for others who are struggling and to come along side them and remind them that they are not alone. I will be with them and You will be with us both! 

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