Farsighted

“Don’t miss tomorrow’s victory because you weren’t willing to endure today’s pain.”

Loren Thornburg

So often we live such shortsighted lives.  We can’t see past today.  We feel pain and we want it to go away rather than have its way in our lives.  It’s much like the story of the man who seeing the moth struggle to emerge from his cocoon thought he would help it by cutting the last section of the cocoon.  Yet what he found was that the moth was unable to fly because it’s wings had not been fully formed.  It was in the pressure of coming through such a small hole that enabled the moth to fly as it was intended to.  How often we act similarly to our pain as well as the pain of others. We want to rescue and relieve and so we intervene not realizing that we are taking the very thing that is bringing us to more of who we were made to be. Let us endure the pain and suffering of today knowing it is enabling us to fly.  

“Consider it wholly joyful, my brethren, whenever you are enveloped in or encounter trials of any sort or fall into various temptations. Be assured and understand that the trial and proving of your faith bring out endurance and steadfastness and patience. But let endurance and steadfastness and patience have full play and do a thorough work, so that you may be [people] perfectly and fully developed [with no defects], lacking in nothing.”

James 1:2-4 AMP

God wants to have full play in your life.  He desires to do a thorough work so that you may be complete, lacking in nothing, but, that takes trial, temptation, suffering and pain.  I wish there was another way.  And there is but it doesn’t bring the joy, the fullness and the completeness that God’s way does.  So then it becomes a matter of being willing.  Am I willing to let Him have His way even when it hurts, even when I don’t see what it is achieving, and even when I don’t know why it has to be like this?  Only when I remember who He is can I stay willing.  He is all knowing, all powerful and all good.  I don’t want to miss anything that He in His all knowing power and goodness wants to do.  I would hate to have endured the pain this long only to miss tomorrow’s victory because I wasn’t willing to endure today’s pain another day. So let us let Him have His way in our lives as well as the lives of those around us. Let us see beyond what is in front of us.  For we can know whether we feel like it or not He is saying, “I have victory for you My Child if you will trust me with this pain.”