I Just Can’t Take it Anymore!

Every felt like that? Completely at the end of your tether? And we kind of look at God and whether we say it to His face or whether we just think it to ourselves – what we really want to know from Him is …

God – what the blazes are you doing? Why are you letting this happen to me? How long are you going to let this go on?

When we’re being stretched and stretched and stretched … it feels as though we just can’t take anymore.

It feels as though if God allows us to be stretched by just one more millimetre, we’re going to snap.

The temptation is just to throw our hands in the air, give up on God and take matters into our own hands. Go fix the problem ourselves. God obviously doesn’t know what He’s doing.

I know I’m being pretty blunt here, but I suspect that that’s exactly what the Lord would have me be just at the moment.

Because the one thing … the one thing that we simply don’t want to do when we’re in that place, is the one thing that God wants us to do!

Have a read of this … from God:

Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the LORD,
and my right is disregarded by my God”? 

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable. 
He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. 

Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; 
but those who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, 
they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:27-30)

When we’re exhausted, when we’re beyond it, when we’re questioning God what’s the one thing He wants us to do?

wait for the LORD

And that word … “wait” … literally means to wait expectantly!

In other words, to wait expecting that God will do something. Expecting that God will strengthen us. Expecting that He will come in power and deliver us.

Why … why does He do it that way? Why does He stretch us so far – almost to breaking point – and then ask us to wait expectantly on Him?

The only way I can answer that is to look back … back on the times when He’s done precisely that and called me to sit quietly, expectantly and wait on Him. In those times of stretching, excruciating as they’ve been, it seems that each time He’s made me more pliable, more flexible, more malleable in His hands, more able to be stretched further the next time.

And it’s in those times of stretching – more than any other time – that I’ve learned firsthand about the faithfulness of God. I know that He is faithful, not just because the Good Book says so, but because I’ve experienced His faithfulness at the end of my tether.

So the next time I’m being stretched – as I am right at this minute as I peck away at my keyboard – my lips speak that which my heart already knows:

Great is your faithfulness Lord unto me
Morning by morning, new mercies I see
All I have needed your hand has provided
Great is your faithfulness Lord unto me. 

And it’s only thus that my faith has grown. It’s only in this place, that I’ve learned to trust in God.

And my hunch is … that’s exactly what He intended all along.

Until next time …