God Is With You In The Struggle

Praise our God, all peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard; he has preserved our lives and kept our feet from slipping. (Psalm 66:8)

Whenever we are going through something difficult, our first reaction is to ask God to remove the difficulty from our lives. We want to deal with the pain, frustration, disappointment, and struggle for as little time as possible. But that’s not always what’s best for us in the long run. 

God does not have to deliver you out of something to bless you. Instead, He can allow you to go through it and keep you, protect you, and preserve you while you are in your situation. That’s the good news we can all cling to. God is with you even in the midst of the worst times in your life.

He may not deliver you from that job, but He will sustain you while you are in it. Your tension after fighting with your best friend might not disappear overnight, but He’ll give you the strength and the comfort you need to move forward. Your family may have to endure the death of a loved one, but God won’t let it destroy you.

In fact, I often think that the things we try to pray away are the things God wants to bring us through to make us more like Himself.

There are times when our testimony isn’t that God will always get us out of trouble, but that He will always be with us in the midst of it.  

*There is a story of a 5-year-old girl who would pick her infant brother up out of his crib every time she heard him cry. One day when the mother was in the kitchen, the baby began to cry, and the sister, like always, picked him up. Immediately, the mother yelled from the kitchen, “Put the baby down or you’re going to spoil him.” So the little sister said okay.

After a while, the mother noticed the baby stopped crying. She calls to the daughter and says, “I told you not to take the baby out of the crib.” The little girl said, “I know mom.” When the mother came into the room, she discovered that the sister hadn’t taken the baby out of the crib, but rather she had climbed into the crib with the baby. 

God may not always pick us up out of our struggles, but He will get in the struggle with you. 

*This originated at No Limits Ministries