Day 24~ Being Strong

Lots of us want to be stronger. Not just physically but emotionally. We want to be able to handle life with poise, elegance and grace; so we pray for God to give us the strength to handle life. 

Now about five minutes later after you've prayed for it, you will get a phone call from somone you don't want to hear from or your car may start giving trouble or some problem will arise that you have to deal with and you ask,

'God, why did you send me this problem? I never asked for this!' 

To which God would reply 'Yes you did.' 

You then say, 'No, I asked for strength!' 

Then God will respond 'Exactly.'

This is how we gain strength; through adversity.

For some reason, however, we have learnt a strange modern mindset about strength, we think that strength is equilivant to cruelty. So the better you are at being cruel, the stronger you are.

That, of course couldn't be further from the truth!

Being strong means that you can carry heavy burdens. It means that those burdens won't crack you, break your spirit or crush your faith. 

Being strong means that you can go through difficult situations during the day and still sing praises to God during the night knowing that he directs your steps. 
Being strong is standing firm in your faith and not being easily swayed by the opinions of the world.
It means that even if you cry or fall you wipe your tears, dust yourself off and get up again!

When you ask for strength, God will inevitably send you difficulty, because we can use difficulty to make us stonger.

You may ask 'How does difficulty make me stronger, it seems to just make my life miserable!'

Well, as the word suggests, difficulty wasn't meant to be easy, it was meant to test us, break us and remake us. And if you look at it differently, you'd realize that every hardship you've gone through has given you a wealth of experience.

You may not have wanted it, but you got it, and thanks to that you can now handle that burden therefore because of it you have become stronger.

It's always good to remember that God knows how much strength you have and how much you can handle and he would never give you more problems than you can handle. So if you have a lot coming against you, feel proud, because God himself has tested you and he knows that he can trust you with it.

So do not dispair over your problems, as difficult as they may seem, because true strength lies in surviving the most tumultuous of storms and living to tell the tale!

This poem shows this concept;

Good Timber

by Douglas Malloch
The tree that never had to fight
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
But lived and died a scrubby thing.

The man who never had to toil
To gain and farm his patch of soil,
Who never had to win his share
Of sun and sky and light and air,
Never became a manly man
But lived and died as he began.

Good timber does not grow with ease:
The stronger wind, the stronger trees;
The further sky, the greater length;
The more the storm, the more the strength.
By sun and cold, by rain and snow,
In trees and men good timbers grow.

Where thickest lies the forest growth,
We find the patriarchs of both.
And they hold counsel with the stars
Whose broken branches show the scars
Of many winds and much of strife.
This is the common law of life.