StrongerSample

Sucker Punched 

While I waited to board the plane, I stole a few moments to begin the words that would become the words you now read. I was having to dig deep into my raw, wounded soul and dredge up feelings I would rather leave buried. Over the course of twelve years, nine close family members had died which included my beloved parents. 

It was time to board the plane and as I headed that direction, I received a phone call from my uncle informing me that my aunt died a few hours earlier. I was sucker punched in the heart. Not again! Dear God, not again. Gwen was like a mother to me. She and my father were the best of friends and the closest of siblings. Now she was dead too, less than two years after I buried my dad. 

Once seated onboard, I began writing again—not on my laptop but in my journal. I believe these words spoke straight from the Spirit of God to my weak and wounded soul: Where there’s no death, there can be no resurrection. Where there’s no cross, there can be no empty tomb. Peace isn’t the absence of crisis. It’s the presence of Christ in my crisis. The things that break me are the things that bring me closer to God.

Then I remembered 1 Peter 1:6–7: “In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith . . . may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”

As the plane took off, I was filled with a tangible, concrete sense of hope. I was going to make it. And by God’s grace, I would do more than just make it. I would allow God to make me—make me a stronger man who knew how to rely on His strength and not my own. I began to experience that as God was breaking me, He was actually making me into a man more like His own Son, Jesus Christ.

Just as smooth seas don’t create skilled sailors, an easy life has no power to purify us and make us stronger. Hard times, on the other hand, transform us in ways that no other force could. 

Sometimes God will remove the weakness and sometimes He will redeem the weakness, but He will never waste your weakness.

What picture comes to mind when you see yourself becoming stronger? Is brokenness woven into that picture?