Win the Day – May 2018
I expect if you are running your race, whatever it is, the enemy is on your tail. Even if you are on a more defined, marked path, this race is long. This race is hard.
As Zac and I were both headed into our newest places to meet need, my friend, Sarah, had a stroke. A dark, terrifying despair found its way to my soul. I’ve never felt such a physical weight pushing me down, so I daydreamed about quitting my race—playing it over and over in my head, justifying it over and over.
I still loved God. But I did not want to keep running. I wanted to be comfortable more than I wanted God’s will for my days.
Simultaneously, our children led us to the emergency room four times in two months. One trip was life threatening and one was brain threatening, and one may still be a chronic illness. My grandmother was placed in hospice and was processing death with my mother, while my best friend lay upstairs on another floor of the hospital in her room, unable to move, unable to talk.
You know how life goes like that sometimes.
Was it a spiritual attack?
I don’t know. It did feel like zombies were on our tail. I will say if it is you, Devil, it is below the belt to mess with my kids.
What I do know: there is a very real and very active battle, and the prize is faith. God gives faith and Satan steals faith. God loves faith more than any other thing in us, and Satan hates our faith more than any other thing.
Faith is the measure to which we believe God is God. And faith is the measure to which we let God be God.
We were living a little more bravely and obediently, and it felt like something or someone was threatened by it. By this journey, this project. It turns out, this is a marathon—not for faint souls and not for those seeking easy and happy quickly. And as I wanted to quit, my people reminded me of my God. We need our people.
Zac, of course, still follows football like any good Texas boy, and he passed me the story of Chip Kelly, the Oregon Ducks football coach. Coach Kelly has a saying that has almost become the slogan of the entire state. And I suggest we make it ours too: “Win the day.”
Will our little tribe of missionaries (that we hope you will join) reach a generation? I don’t know.
But today, I’ll spend a few moments alone with God and really talk to him. And I’ll write you these words and send a few e-mails and hop on a few seemingly insignificant calls. I’ll sweep the cereal crumbs up from breakfast and cheer for my husband as he takes some financial risks to follow God. Even though I’m scared and kind of want to say, “Heck no.” Even though every piece of today feels small.
I’ll do today, glancing up and remembering a race is completed step by step and day by day.
Great people don’t do great things. God does great things with surrendered people. And surrender happens every day in one thousand small moments.
Win the day. Run the steps in front of you today.
(The above is an excerpt from Restless by Jennie Allen)