It seems like a great irony that we gain strength through struggle. I know we wish that we had strength some other way. Yet time and again in life we can see the truth of it, that struggle and opposition builds our strength when we push through and endure.

  How many times have you prayed God would make you stronger or that he would increase your faith or patience and you are shocked when he challenges you.  It’s like this.  If I wanted to get in shape and sat down with a personal trainer outlining what I need to shape up, to strengthen my body and improve my health.  How does the trainer accomplish this?  By challenging me.  He doesn’t really do the work in the sense that you have to move your muscles and believe in the process.  He gives you wisdom and guidance, perhaps encouragement and instructions.  You do the work. You grow strong as he challenges your body, your mind, and as he holds you accountable for living out better habits.  You pay a personal trainer to make things difficult so you can grow.  God is like that personal trainer.  He challenges us, helps us realize the need for different patterns.  He points our things that are inhibiting your growth and challenges you to push past limitations you have placed on yourself.  It is his work, but you are the one who moves.  He challenges and strengthens and encourages you to face each one head on.  We work in concert with Christ getting stronger.  

So here I sit, having prayed that God would increase in me, that my faith would be stronger.  What do I get?  A life filled with challenges and obstacles.  After all, only troubles/trials require a miraculous solution.  All kinds of opportunities and chances to use my faith muscles.  However, I am not feeling like I’m at that excited beginning of the program feeling.  I’m at mile 16 and realizing that the finish line is nowhere in sight and that I’m somewhere in the middle.  Too far from the start to go back, but how do I keep going?  Instead of feeling stronger I feel ready to just say enough!  How can I keep on and find the strength to keep moving.

Then I see it up ahead, the refreshing station.  Yes, every long distance race has them.  That is what I pray for.  I need respite!  I know that God has promised to not only accomplish the work but to sustain me in the meantime.  So I cry out for a refreshing, for a 2^nd wind, for reminders of how he has already carried me so far.  I need a song in the night, and provision for this moment.  I need the faith to say that even here I believe and cling.  I have to keep wanting to grow even when it hurts.  And trust God to know how hard and how far to push me.  He is the only one who really knows.  And I need to keep asking him to keep challenging me till I am what he is working to create in me.  Not easy but necessary.

Recently I was reminded that if you help a butterfly out of the cocoon out of pity, it will never fly.  God is not going to release us from our cocoon.  In his wisdom he knows we can only fly through struggle, we are developing strength in our wings to fly.  So I need to stop asking God to end my difficulties and my struggles in life and instead embrace them as opportunities to become a strong child of God, one that doesn’t fold when life is hard, because it will continue to challenge me.