Striking Whilst the Iron’s Hot – To Overcome!

“Our days may come to seventy years,

or eighty, if our strength endures;

yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow,

for they quickly pass, and we fly away.”

~Psalm 90:10 (NIV, 2010).

The odds are always against us in this life. But that’s not the end of the story. It’s merely the beginning—the premise we commence from.

The message that comes with this life is the verb, overcome.

If nothing can climb over us, scaling the walls of our resilience, our strength will endure. Yet, somehow, we know our strength has limitation; beyond trouble and sorrow there is God—our most necessary God. Life just doesn’t make any sense without a belief in Jesus.

The Resigned Declaration is the Sign – To Overcome

There’s a time that comes into all our lives when we’re pushed into either an acutely forlorn or a chronically faint hopelessness. It must surely come to us all. Perhaps in this we’re aligning with Moses’ abovementioned sentiment of Psalm 90:10.

It is so easy to focus on the negative, forgetting all about the very positive promises of God. We all do it. We all doubt, lose sight of the objective, and enter hopelessness, even fleetingly.

This is the sign. We’re ready to overcome. For, overcoming has no purpose when there is nothing to overcome.

Life’s Like a Crinkled Garment

Do you ever feel ‘creased,’ like life’s gotten all confusing and chaotic all of a sudden? We all tend to have these times, though, exceptionally, some do have such even keels they deal with life ever so deftly. That’s not the human default, however.

What use is a clothing iron if not to even out the creases?

The same contends for our need to overcome.

Overcoming our life difficulties through a stoic and God-trusting approach—no matter how bad things get—is a victory against the odds, and so far as the sweetness-of-contentment is concerned, there is none better.

Our Days Seem Long – Make the Very Most of Each

The massive truth about Moses’ psalm is that our days seem long. But, we’re but dust.

As we genuinely “count” each of our days (Psalm 90:12)—doing so by overcoming all the chattering glitches in the name of our Lord—we achieve for ourselves as much mastery over this life as God has afforded us to achieve.

But, the core of the message is ‘now’. Now it is that we must strike. It’s a ‘resilient now’ that we most blessed to exhibit.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.