Expect Difficulty, Receive God’s Resurrection Blessing

“Life is difficult.  This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.  It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it.  Once we truly know that life is difficult – once we truly understand and accept it – then life is no longer difficult.  Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters.

— M. Scott Peck (1936 – 2005) (The Road Less Traveled)

God gave me a very helpful acronym, ED = Expect Difficulty.  Ever since, I’ve experienced a resurrection blessing.

The above quote, in the context of The Resurrection, proves the power implicit in wrestling with reality, in that God causes us to rise, to ascend above the difficulty.  Why?  Because we can.  Because when we rise to meet difficulty, the difficulty is no longer the difficulty.  It was only our perception of it.  It can only ever be.

The best organisation of a soul occurs as a result, first, of disorganisation and chaos. It’s a biblical pattern.  God disarms the ego, then restores us in reorienting us through humility.  And that’s a long process.  Difficulty is necessary.  It’s vital.  We can thank God for it, in hindsight, yes, but also in the midst of it.  And, sure, we might lag.  We might get stuck for a time, occasionally, in our disappointment.  But that’s not where it ends.  We must continue on in the journey.  If we don’t we languish, and then we need resurrecting again.  God will only resurrect us if we want it, and desire it enough to do something about it.

And we can be assured of the blessing God provides having been resurrected:

Growth is God’s compensation for patiently enduring difficulty.  Transformation is God’s reward for not giving up through grief.

***

This is the resurrection truth of life: life must overcome us, before we overcome it, in Jesus’ name!

Life threatens to break us, and it’s only when it does that we see we needed to be broken to learn how to overcome.

The resurrection truth of life shows we must die to what entombs us before we can be raised to life’s abundance.

We must experience the ‘death’ of difficulty patiently, expecting it, before we receive God’s resurrection blessing.

© 2016 Steve Wickham.