Is Anything Too Difficult?

Held in God’s embrace, acknowledging His power, encourages us through dark periods.

The book of Jeremiah, though written in a time of exile, promises a pledge of restoration for all

of us and we gratefully know that however dark our personal circumstances our prospects are

bright. Read recently, ‘Darkness is a passageway, not a destination.’ When we are in the throes

of challenging caretaking times, we can feel as if we are in a desert, described in the book of

Genesis as a place of exile.

The desert as a theme is the calling out and the passing through, the perseverance, the

hope, the not-arriving. It took the Israelites forty years to make an eleven-day journey and they

learned through the years they had to surrender their wilderness mentality, which was not

having a positive vision for their lives. Deuteronomy 1:6, “The Lord, our God, said to us at

Horeb: You have stayed long enough at this mountain.”

The Israelites experience of abandonment was both disempowering and empowering at

the same time. As they encountered their own powerlessness, the Israelites learned to rely

totally on their One God. The blessings of the desert are the call to remain faithful in the face

of the unknowing, the opportunity to persevere and seek God in His absence. Do you find

yourself going around the same mountains or are you trusting God and His promises? Making

the transition from Wilderness living to Promised Land living, where we expect God’s goodness,

is a shift in our focus. Remember what we focus on, gains the strength!

Every day we need a fresh word from God that speaks to our hearts and helps us center

on what is important. With hope in this Scripture that nothing is too difficult, we can believe

God will lead us to our ‘Promised Land.’ Yes, on the way, our faith will be stretched as we allow

it to be. In my personal experience, as caretaker for my Mother, numerous times God made a

way where there did not seem to be one. Believing God saw the bigger picture and had good in

store for me, I was able to surrender (to an extent, because all of us are a work in progress!)

We may feel forgotten and left on our own, but God is always with us. He is faithful

even in our hardest struggles. We have His Word and the Holy Spirit continuing to guide us. We

have the model of the Israelites who kept pressing through and God continued to be with them

as well, guiding them with a cloud. Exodus 33:14, “The Lord answered: I Myself will go along, to

give you rest.”

Perhaps the most difficult circumstances have the greatest potential to teach us the

most about endurance. I believe God’s miracles lie right before our eyes as we choose to look

for them and stay close to His presence. Though we might get discouraged along the way, we

hold on to the hope in, Psalm 34:19, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted, saves those

whose spirit is crushed.”