Sunday, November 17, 2013

#18 Nearness in the Impossibility

The Sovereign Lord is my strength; He makes my feet like the feet of a deer, He enables me to tread on the heights.  Habakkuk 3:19

Today I finished week 4 of a 20 week marathon training program.  It is dead obvious to me that I can’t run a marathon.  After 3 miles, I’m done.  I can’t will myself to run farther and faster.  But this morning I ran 10 miles, which is father than I’ve ever gone before. 

The Habakkuk verse has been a constant friend to me on each of these runs.  I didn’t have the strength in me today.  But in the dozens and dozens of times when I felt like stopping, I asked the Lord to give me His strength to keep going.  He did just that!  He gave me the strength to finish.  What an honor to feel on a physical level what happens when we trust the Lord.

How incredible that the Lord gives us His strength!  His strength never runs out.

On that run, all the thoughts I can remember were directed to the Lord.  Because I was asking so often for strength, He never really left my mind.  It’s easy to trust the Lord when I’m doing something impossible.  It’s not as easy to keep Him in my mind when I’m having a typical day and doing things I can do without asking for His help.

Don’t get me wrong.  Technically without the Lord, we can do nothing.  He is still working in me and through me even when I am not consciously asking for His help, but I miss out in a huge way when I am doing all these things without conversing with Him. 

It’s almost like this:  Imagine the man of your dreams asked you out on a date.  He had a whole day planned out to the minute, full of all kinds of fun things for you two to do together to get to know each other.  He had it all set for you both, and then the day finally arrived.  You were both there.  He showed you what to do step by step and you did the activities, but you never responded back to him.  You experienced his whole plan for the day, but you never said a word to him.  What a loss!  You missed the opportunity to get to know him more, which was the whole point of the activities in the first place.

I don’t want to do that anymore.  I want to be speaking and getting to know the Lord more everyday as we do what He has set out for us to do.  No more ignorance. 


And for you sweet Eden, I pray for many impossible things.  I pray that He would lead you to do things that are completely beyond what you can do, and then that He’d show you how together with Him, you can do anything. 

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