How God Comes Alive At the Loneliest of Times

Driving a long road, alone, and bereft of any sense of direction besides to keep going, this loneliest of times was to become the making of me. But who would have known? The ‘making of me’ was never destined to become a world exclusive event, but the ‘making of us’ is always eternally poignant in the heavens.

It was September and October 2003. My marriage had collapsed before my very eyes and everything I put my stock of image into was obliterated. I may have become a workaholic and a weekend binge drinker, but my true foundation was my family – at that time it wasn’t even God.

I lost it all, yet I had to lose it all to gain it all.

God comes alive all of a sudden when we need him. The Lord is silent until pain bellows even into the fissures of our mortal soul. At the loneliest of times, when we are so empty because we have accepted our weakness, and we need to remain weak to gather God’s power, we have access to Spiritual strength. This transcends our understanding. It can only ever be of God.

It’s too easy to say, “In our weakness is God’s strength.” It gets clichéd. But when we understand that we ought to glory even (especially, even) in our weakness, we have the capacity to gather this otherwise ungatherable strength of God.

Glorying in our weakness is not slothing about, celebrating the ease of retirement. But it is the shunning of our selfish desires that come to the fore too much. The more of God, the less of us, the better off we are ever to be.

The beauty of God is manifest in the tumultuous struggle which tyrannises our sense for justice in life. When we maintain our trust that God is good despite how insanely destabilised we are, God becomes that power he has always promised to become. Suddenly the power to turn the tables on our experience is freed up.

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In the loneliest times the Spirit of God talks. We often make too much of complex and not enough of the simple. God is coming alive in your struggle, today, if you will lean on the only One who can help. And he will help. God does not delay in bringing us strength, but just make sure you use that strength wisely, and ultimately for others.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.