I like the story Dr. Lenore Campbell recalls from one of her patients: “Early in my career as a doctor I went to see a patient who was coming out of anesthesia. Far off church chimes sounded. “I must be in heaven,” the woman murmured. Then she saw me. “No, I can’t be,” she said, “there’s Dr. Campbell.”
Or the story of when in 1858 the Illinois legislature sent someone else to the U.S. Senate instead of Abraham Lincoln, although Lincoln had won the popular vote. When a sympathetic friend asked Lincoln how he felt, he said, “Like the boy who stubbed his toe: I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh.”
The Bible tells us the story (1 Kings 18-20) of when the prophet Elijah experienced discouragement with God when he was threatened to be killed by the evil Queen Jezebel after he defeated her 450 prophets of Baal. Running scared for his life: “And the word of the Lord came to him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” He replied, “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty…and now they are trying to kill me too.” (1 kings 19: 9-10).
Elijah had just done some big time ministry for God and in return he gets this? I don’t think this is what he signed up for. But as we have just read and what we can take from this is, God will not leave us living in perpetual discouragement. Rather God will encounter (speak to) those who are running from Him and send us back into service.
“The Lord said to him, “Go back the way you came, and go to the Desert of Damascus. When you get there, anoint Hazael king over Aram.” (1 Kings 19:15).
To quote Philip Yancey, “Endurance is not just the ability to bear a hard thing, but to turn it into glory.”
Tim Hall is pastor with Victory Way Church in Quesnel.
