Do you ever feel like you just can’t go on? A bit overwhelmed and stressed with the every-day’s demanding responsibilities, eventful family matters, disturbing health issues, wavering and unresolved relationships, weighty decisions that need to be made now, current world events make that global, conditions….?
Do you grow faint? Are you “keeping on keeping on”, stumbling along the way?
While living in the Darien jungle, we were not aware that for two years there was a plot to kill us! We lived in a very remote area and the discovery of our bodies would have never been found. Upon learning of the plan, my head began to spin. I looked across the room at my two beautiful little girls and reality came tumbling into my consciousness like a fast-approaching hurricane! Fight or Flight…there was no escape…
…Talk about growing faint!
Jeremiah, “the weeping prophet”, faced a similar conspiracy and he wrote:
“If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out,
how can you compete with horses?
If you stumble in safe country,
how will you manage in the thickets by Jordan?”
If we grow faint with lesser trials and feel like quitting, what will we do when the battle gets even harder? The river Jordan in flood stage overflowed its banks into a plain that grew up into a dense thicket! Pictured in this verse is their invaders overwhelming the land like a flood. We, like Jeremiah, need to be ready to deal with tougher times. “If you falter in times of trouble, how small is your strength!” Prov. 10:24 He makes His strength perfect in our weakness. We have to get out of the way and let Him take control! Where is your confidence right now?
Jeremiah knew the scheme the people of Anathoth had against him to kill him, because God had told him. Like many of us, he wanted to know “why the wicked escape for a time unscathed and appear to prosper? Why do all the faithless live at ease?” Jer. 12: 1
Do you ever ask yourself that? Why me?
God’s answer was simply, “Buckle up, Jeremiah, your life, as a prophet of my truth, has yet to see my nature revealed! I have the plan…albeit, a longsuffering one…I am forever looking for repentance and a yieldedness to My will, unlike the rebellious and defiant ones.” (Paraphrased)
Our Challenge:
“If we falter in times of trouble,
how small is our strength!”
Prov. 10:24
~Jackie Johnson - I am a former tribal missionary to the Kuna Indians on the Colombian border in Central America. Fluent in several languages, my husband and I currently pastor a Spanish-speaking church in Southern California. My passion is mentoring and equipping dedicated young women for life, marriage, motherhood, and beyond. I am the mother of two daughters and the grandmother of three Princesses and four young Knights.
