Sometimes life kicks the dog shit out of you... but there's still hope
Life can be brutal. It can really rip you in half and just keep coming at you. Relentlessly.
You might be walking through something like you've never seen or felt before. It's trying and testing and stretching every fabric of who you are. But the way you know you're going to make it through is because you're reading this. You're still here and you're still fighting.
It very well may feel like the fight left you a long time ago but that's just not true because you're here. We don't give ourselves credit when just opening our eyes is a battle won some days--especially on days when we've been sapped of all of our energy.
I'm writing this to tell you to hold on. And when you feel like letting go, when you're at the absolute end of yourself and you find yourself letting go, that's when God is truly holding you. He wouldn't allow this if it was going to end you. He allowed it because it came to rebuild you. And to restore you.
This affliction came with reason. It came with instruction and lesson. It didn't surprise God when it showed up on your doorstep. And I can assure you, especially after having walked through such fucking flames as I've walked through--I never walked through them alone. And they never actually burned me.
We're allowed to walk through the fire but God walks with us and keeps the flames from overcoming us. There's a story in the Bible about some young men that were thrown into a furnace to be put to death for not worshipping the king. When the king ordered a soldier to look inside and report back what he saw, he said that the three men that were bound and thrown in remain alive and there appears to be a fourth man with them that looks like the Son of God. The ropes that had bound their hands were also burned off but the flames did not hurt the three young men.
When they came out of the fire, the king ordered that their God be worshipped.
These three men, like you and me, were not spared from being thrown into the fire. The fire burned away what was restraining them and they came out of the fire not only alive but as the scripture reports, without the smell of smoke.
You are in the furnace right now and the heat is being turned up. But you are not in the furnace alone and the flames are burning away, not you, but the things that were once holding you back. There's a fourth man in the flames with you and he looks like the Son of God.
My new book Dads, Kiss Your Sons is out now!
It's available wherever you buy books!
"It’s a call an entire generation of fathers probably needs to hear."
