Never Been Stronger

Mid-life kind of “snuck up on me,” friends. At 44, I guess I’ve been running full-speed ahead and never pausing to think for a minute that life is AT LEAST half over for me (unless God’s got an extra decade or so lined up for me that the average American woman doesn’t get). And in the midst of this sudden “mid-life awareness,” trouble began to push in at me from many sides. Struggles in loved-ones lives, struggles in friends’ lives, struggles in my own life (which I thought had been dead and buried for years now). I began to feel the very true reality that life was just hard, for me and for many whom I love. My weakness and inability to “fix things” grew heavy upon me until I began popping out emotionally.

I picked up a well-loved book by John Piper, and began asking God for fresh eyes to see truth. “The goal of the gospel is not an easy life. It is deeper knowledge of God and deeper trust in God,” Piper says. He goes on, “…the gospel is strange. Its goal is not my immediate ease. Its goal is my being so in love with Christ and so passionate about his glory that when my suffering can highlight his worth I will bear it gladly” (God is The Gospel, Piper).

These words hit a spot in me that needed to be hit again. The spot that is so prone to pour over my sorrows that I forget to look at Christ and see his glory. I am so intent on God relieving my suffering that I miss the fact that He is literally working IN the suffering. This is what Paul points to when he writes,

Three times I pleaded with the Lord about this, that it should leave me. But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest on me. For the sake of Christ then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

2 Cor. 12:9b-10

Though I had loved and cherished these verses most of my life, they meant something new to me in my mid-life awareness. These words told me that in my weakness–the weakness I was so down about–my life was a magnet for Christ’s power to rest on me. That was GOOD NEWS! In fact, in this weakness of mid-life, I was more prepped than ever for Christ’s power to be on me, in me, and at work through me. MORE GOOD NEWS!

Perhaps you too are feeling the toll of suffering right now, whether in your own life or in the lives of those you love. Commit your way to God. Your suffering is the means of God’s power resting on you. Rather than being worse off than you’ve ever been, you are actually positioned more perfectly than ever for God to come and be at work in and through you. This is Good News, my friend. Yield yourself to the One who works all things for good in your life, because you love Him and are called according to His purpose. I’m still learning how to be content with these weaknesses of mine, but if it means more of Jesus in me, then I can hang on…I’ve Never Been Stronger.