I don’t know who needs this tonight. But grief is like a box. You feel trapped by walls that you can’t touch or see and you feel a need to escape but can’t. This is why so many turn to suicide, because the box is everywhere. You run one direction and it follows you, you go another direction and it’s still there. The worst part of the box is that it is there even when you try and escape into sleep. It follows you into your dreams and makes you feel like you can’t breathe.
No one else sees the box, so they don’t understand how you feel.
But Jesus sees the box. He alone can hear you pounding on its barriers and screaming for help. The best part is, counselors and support groups -though great – can only meet you outside of the box. They try to coax you out and then meet you on the other side. But Jesus doesn’t need to wait until you are free from the box. He goes into the box with you. He sits there with you as long as you feel you need to be there. Because sometimes fighting the box takes too much out of us and we need time to sit and cry. When you are ready, Jesus will hold your hand, tap the box wall and make it fall before you. He will set you free.
If you are in a box right now, take a moment to speak the name of Jesus and realize that you are not alone.
Tag: don’t give up
When it’s too late
When it’s too late
The question is, when do you give up?
Recently I had a friend pass away. But where she went is my struggle. We had often spoken about Jesus. Mostly to a grunt on her part or perhaps a sympathetic smile. She had grown up in a ‘live how you like but believe that God exists and you will go to Heaven’ church, convincing her of anything else was hard. But nothing is impossible for God. We prayed when she needed prayer, but when God answered she would find an excuse to show that the cure or help came from something other than God. Eventually I stopped pushing. Then she turned 95 and I began pushing again. I felt her time was running out. But I failed her. I never once had the courage to move past talking about God and all He can do and praying with her from time to time, to actually saying, “have you accepted Jesus?”
Now she is gone and I don’t know of she ever made that change. The type of “church” she had grown up in did not believe you had to accept Jesus to go to Heaven and she never did so while we were together. All I can do is hope that in her private time she turned her life over to God.
I recall a preacher once saying, “that person you feel will never change. The one you have given up praying for. Is your battleground. You have to fight past the doubt the devil puts in your mind and keep talking to that person and praying for him/her.”
It’s hard and scary to ask a friend a question that could ruin your friendship forever. But ‘too late’ comes faster than you might imagine. Take the chance. Don’t give up. People can change. God can work miracles. And you don’t want to be here. Sitting and wondering. Did she ever accept Jesus? Or is she forever in…. no, you don’t want to be here.
Carried in the cross 