When Asking “Why” Has Run You Dry
Hard times will come…
Hard times will come. We all have heard that. It is a part of life, right? We all know pain will come; eventually, this is quite unavoidable. But just because someone tells you they are going to punch you in the gut, doesn’t make it hurt any less. We may know it is coming, yet hard times are still hard, and pain still hurts. This one-two punch may be unavoidable in life, but how we handle it is our counterattack.
When you have tried it all…
When things bring us down, we start searching for what to do. At certain times we need to take a step back and focus on growth. Other times, we may need to take a step of faith forward and trust a little more. And of course, there will be times where we need to do the very thing we are avoiding at all cost! But what do we do when we have tried it all? The times in life when we buckle down and give it all we’ve got. What happens when that doesn’t seem to be enough?
Those times in life that we run into a situation where we have searched high and low for an answer, a direction is difficult. We seek something that can give us a twinkle of hope to hold onto, even if it is a tough thing to embrace. What do we do then? You find yourself all out of ideas, no plan to put in place, or something to get your mind off of what you are facing. It seems that you cannot escape it. This is plain tough to go through. But there is something to do.
What to do now …
If we take the mentality of just needing our situation fixed, then we will get frustrated when we have no way to fix it. You can try other avenues that may seem to help out in the time, but deep down they are not the solution. Sometimes there is only one way to get through it, wait. There is confidence in knowing that God is always moving in our lives, and because of that, sometimes we need to stop moving. You may not even believe in God or think that God even cares about what you are going through. But, he does, and in these moments, we need to rest in the waiting room with Him. We may only see the importance of the deliverance of the outcome, but God understands the importance of the outcome of what he is working within us.
I wish I could write about how much easier this makes it all, or that I know exactly why we go through these extraordinarily tough times where we can’t find any direction. But I can’t. What I can say is if we don’t wait for God when he has asked us, we will miss out on what He does have planned. This path is not an easy one. Honestly, it can feel like the worst of paths, but we must trust even when it seems unnecessary.
Buried beneath the Why…
This question we all face at some point in life. Why? We face it in many situations and circumstances. A lot of times the Why cannot be answered today, or tomorrow, or even twenty years from now. So, what happens when our nagging question is too big to handle? There is something buried beneath the weight of your Why if you are willing to dig. It is not the answer, but it is the answer when the Why has become too much. When you don’t have any energy left to dig for the answer, remember the Who. There is a Who that the Why has to answer to.
Let your Who be greater than your Why…
Trusting, when there is no reason to trust, hoping when you have drained all hope dry, these are the moments of growth that God is using. I don’t know why He chooses to use these moments, but He does. I certainly cannot guarantee you that you will one day find out why. But you will find moments, where this new self, once broken, is now being restored. And this new person is doing things differently. It simply may be responding in a way that your old self would never have thought possible. Or looking someone else in the eyes and seeing their hurt, that feels like your own once again, and being the comfort that maybe you once prayed for. We may never truly know in this life Why, but God will always show us How to use those Why moments if we allow Him to.
Step of faith to wait…
There is something that happens when we take a step of faith where we don’t see a step, and there is something completely different that happens when we take a step of faith just to wait. It is often the step of faith that we have no strength for, no desire to seek, nothing left inside of us to take. This waiting is the step of faith where we need to continue to hope, to expect, to be persistent in waiting. In this, there is something inside us that grows a little stronger and a little more fierce as it seems we are doing nothing. We will surely feel even weaker as we do, but we are still growing stronger. This step of faith to wait when we have tried all else can be the most tiring. But it can be the most rewarding! When you cannot answer the question of your Why, look to the answer of Who.
Words to Live By:
“Even when there was no reason for hope, Abraham kept hoping–believing that he would become the father of many nations. For God had said to him, That’s how many descendants you will have!” Romans 4:18.
“Wait for the Lord;be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord” Psalm 24:17.
