How Hard Is That?

I'm not visiting castles any more, since I'm living in America now. However, life is still a journey. God has been teaching me a lot lately, and I find I learn a lesson better when I write about it. So I'm going to start blogging about the journey of life, throwing in some castle pictures as I go.

I'm currently reading through a book by Joyce Meyer called Battlefield of the Mind: Winning the Battle in Your Mind. I'm reading a chapter each morning while eating breakfast. It doesn't seem like brilliant new ideas--but they are still ideas I need to hear and be reminded of.

This morning I read Chapter 18. She's going through "Wilderness Mentalities"--attitudes that kept the Children of Israel in the wilderness for 40 years and that also keep us figuratively in the wilderness much longer than we need to be. Today's chapter was called "Please make it easy; I can't take it if things are too hard!"

I was especially struck by this paragraph: "Even when we are determined to press through and do something, we spend so much time thinking and talking about 'how hard it is' that the project ends up being much more difficult than it would have been had we been positive instead of negative."

The reason that paragraph hit me was that just a couple of days ago, my friend and I were commiserating about how often our sons complain and complain over schoolwork. By the time they stop complaining about how much they have to do or how hard it is, they could have finished the schoolwork three times over! Watching it frustrates us to no end.

However, reading this, I realized that I do exactly the same thing--about life! I think about the things I feel God is specifically asking me to do at this time in my life:

1. Don't brood over past hurts. God forgives, and God can beautifully handle any lessons that the ones who hurt me need to be taught.

2. Don't worry about the future. God can handle it.

3. Rejoice!

Okay, those jobs don't really sound terribly hard, do they?

So why, why do I hear myself telling people how hard it is to carry these out? Why do I say, "It would be so much easier if I could just say, 'To hell with that person!' and get angry and put them out of my life." Now there's a lie of Satan!

Okay, maybe as far as doing it goes, brooding and resentment is easier. But as far as being easier on me, easier on my body, easier on my well-being, easier on my relationships, rejoicing is unbelievably easier!

Now, even with that said, it's one thing to say, "Don't brood, forgive." and quite another thing to do it. Joyce Meyer speaks to that issue, too. She says, "Things get hard when we are trying to do them independently without relying on God's grace. If everything in life were easy, we would not even need the power of the Holy Spirit to help us.... He is in us and with us all the time to help us, to enable us to do what we cannot do--and, I might add, to do with ease what would be hard without him."

After I read that, I got to thinking that it's not like this journey through a crisis in my marriage and separation from my husband has not been hard. It's unquestionably been the hardest time in my life.

As I was thinking about that, she continued on: "Sometimes God leads us the hard way instead of the easy way, because He is doing a work in us. How will we ever learn to lean on Him, if everything in our lives is so easy that we can handle it by ourselves?"

Going back to the Children of Israel, she says, "He took them the harder way to teach them Who He was and that they could not depend on themselves."

Amen!!! In the end, the harder way is worth it. However, when the way starts getting easier, let's not try to make much of our "suffering" and complain about the hard road. When the path starts being easier, don't waste your time talking about the big mountain you see coming up or complaining about the peak you just climbed. Be quiet, rejoice in a downhill stretch, and start walking! :)

Let's see, next I'll post a picture of a castle at the top of a waterfall. We had a steep, steep climb to get there, and then a gorgeous view rewarded us at the top. Climbing back to the car was much easier--but being tired still made it hard. How annoying, though, it would be to spend the whole downhill climb complaining about how tired we were!