This is the Breathe Meditation for the week. Written and produced to help you know, love, and enjoy God, to follow Him with your heart, and to love like Jesus.
For the next six weeks, we will look at what the Bible says about how we can weather headwinds and hardship. Jesus will teach us how we too can be overcomers!
Jesus tells us that “in the world, you have tribulation and distress and suffering, but be courageous [be confident, be undaunted, be filled with joy]; I have overcome the world.” John 16:33 AMP
Years ago I was sitting in a recovery meeting reciting the Serenity Prayer with 60 or 70 other men and women, who like me, were confronting the stiff headwind of recovery.
The phrases “...accepting hardship as a pathway to peace” and “taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is” stopped me dead in my tracks.
Out loud to myself, I said “I DON’T WANT HARDSHIP!!! I WANT IT EASY.”
You see, I, like many – if not most – of us don’t like hardship. We want to avoid it altogether, or at least to get out of it as quickly as possible. And, we don’t want to take this broken world as it is… We want to fix people, places, and things.
A headwind can come out of the north with a bitter cold brought on by holding on to some addicting habit that sucks the warmth from your soul.
Or out of the east like hope staggering to rise like Lazarus from the dead, years of chronic pain, or becoming more and more familiar with grief as we grow older.
The fast west wind of youth when you are stalled or drifting in your faith or your career, your fidelity, or putting out into deep water learning to stay close to Jesus.
Headwinds racing out of the south can be a form of God calling us up and out – a burning bush experience, a Goliath standing in the way of duty, a betrayal, or even a self-inflicted wound.
Yet it is the Headwinds that help us soar.
They are the lift facet of the Holy Spirit. Headwinds develop holy resistance that forms the muscles of a spiritual endurance runner, the Force that forges endurance. It is a friend, not a foe.