A Graceful Limp

Editor's Note: The title of this blog entry has been changed. Because it made the editor happier. The ways of God are strangely and invariably mysterious. I have often wondered why he sometimes appoints people for great and magnificent undertakings and yet permits them to be inflicted with great disabilities such that they become utterly inadequate for the undertakings to which he appoints them (short of saying that it is actually he who inflicts these disabilities on them).

I am one such person. Never at any one point in my life have I experienced the exercise of my ministerial role as a giant. I have often seen myself as one who limps my way into the spotlight to proclaim the loving grace of God and his ability to sustain us through life's struggles. But there are moments when I wonder how convicted I am of what I proclaim. When my own intangile disabilities weigh heavily on my heart and violently toss the realities of my life around, and I seek a solace that is never found, my emotional limp worsens. It is such a painful challenge, during such moments, to say:

Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. But perhaps this is precisely what he desires for me to learn to profess throughout such moments in my life journey. Afflictions in the form of disabilities that cannot be seen with the naked eye force me to abide trusting in the One from whom nothing is hidden. They necessitate a very real faith in the invisible work of the One who has authored my life story, to abandon myself to the belief that he will bring this story to a beautiful completion.