“We’ve been surrounded and battered by troubles, but we’re not demoralized; we’re not sure what to do, but we know that God knows what to do; we’ve been spiritually terrorized, but God hasn’t left our side; we’ve been thrown down, but we haven’t broken.” (2 Corinthians 4:8b-9 The Message Bible)
You load up your cart as you check out at the grocery store. You gently and carefully place each plastic bag in a place where your purchased items will not experience smashing, crushing, or damaging. As you begin to push your cart toward the door, you tell the cashier, “You have a good day too!” You proceed to your car to load your groceries. Bag after bag, you load your groceries in the trunk of your car. You have one more bag to move from the cart to the car. You lift it up and the handle on the plastic bag breaks and your initial expression is one of disgust, such that cannot be disguised, and occasionally your look is accompanied by expressions consisting of words that should have been dismissed long ago from one’s vocabulary. What did you do? You picked them up and put the groceries in the car, one by one, and you kept going. You kept going.
This reminds me of a time years ago at a fairly new eastside mall where a little girl was walking down the main walkway inside the mall and one of her sandals either came off or she just walked out of it. She did not break her pace at all, didn’t stop to pick up the shoe, just kept on walking at the same pace, moving forward. She kept on going.
Things happen in our lives, unexpectedly and unwanted. Things happen suddenly and surprisingly, and surely not how we planned them to turn out. We experience brokenness, loss, and disrupting changes, What should we do? Try to fix what you can, depending on the Lord to help you, as well as those in your orbit of friends who are part of your family, one of the members of the body of Christ. And the, press on and keep on going. In the two stories above, the groceries made it home and the shoe lost by the little girl was recaptured by a family member. It turned out all right. In both cases, the individual kept on going. Yes, they kept on going.
Whatever you experience today that is unexpected, unplanned, unwanted, and even undesirable, you keep on going. And as you go, keep holding on to God’s unchanging hand. Things will turn out all right after while Be blessed!
“If you were able to fall a hundred times as a child and rise, you are able to fall a thousand times as a grown up and soar.” (Quote by Matshona Dhliwayo)
Still committed to the climb,
Mark L. King