I had lunch with a friend the other day, and as we often do our conversation shifted towards God. As we talked, I began to describe some of the things happening with R3 and what personal challenges I needed to be working on next. That’s when she said something to me that didn’t fully register until a few days later. (Hey, no one ever said I was quick!) She told me I was “patient.” Now let me put this in perspective; patience is not a trait I view myself as having. Put me behind a slow moving car, shopping cart, pedestrian and I start to twitch with irritation. But more than that, I’ve always viewed patience as a weak area, because I can see all the times I’ve failed.
However her comment got me thinking. Over the next few days I began to ask myself, what if I am more patient than I think? What if an area I think I struggle in, is an area she views as my strength? What if she wished she had my level of “weakness”?
It’s surprisingly easy to assume someone else has it all together, while we are complete failures.
I suspect we all have the tendency to look around and say, “if only I could be more like them, then I’d be set.” But in reality “they” struggle just as much as we do - just with different things. The truth is we all have areas of weakness. And if you’re like me, sometimes it feels like you collect them!
So what do we do then? One option is to say we’re so messed up that we’ll never be able to fix our lives. But that doesn’t seem like a very Biblical approach to me. I think a better solution is this: we keep working at it. In fact, a “righteous man falls seven times, and rises again.” (Proverbs 24:16).
Part of being “righteous” is simply the act of getting up again. And again. And again.
If we look at people who have done amazing things for God, they aren’t characterized by perfection, but by the fact that they keep getting up. David committed adultery. Moses killed someone. Jeremiah questioned whether God had the right person. But they all did amazing things simply because they got back up when they fell down.
And so can you.
