For the Love - Day 11

It's icy here. Just this past week I literally used the entire front end of one of the school's mini-vans to keep myself from flying all over the ice like something you'd otherwise only see in a cartoon.  I took a little comfort from the fact that even the youngest students were doing the "penguin" walk. 

But the danger of ice can pale in comparison to the peril we feel when we feel ourselves falling in an existential way.  Perhaps we didn't get the grade we needed, or the financial aid package, the internship, the graduate position, or the job.  Sometimes the fall we dread - is the breakup, the medical test results ... that phone call late at night ... 

Verse  17 of Psalm 94 sums it up - "If the Lord had not been my help - I would've soon have dwelt in the abode of silence."

There is a way in which God comes close to us when we are faced with what we couldn't imagine facing.  He does steady us.  He does indeed comfort us and make us feel secure.  This doesn't mean that struggle become painless - or we morph into some lab-experiment-gone-wrong kind of freak and are immune to these things.  Instead - God - in ways we could've never before hand even grasped - not with the most eloquent explanations - offers us truth, understanding, insight - and most of all lends meaning to our struggle. 

The very things that threaten to bring us down - in His tender-loving hands - become the stepping stones we use to climb closer to Him still.