My kids are one belt away from earning their black belt in martial arts. One of the tasks they have to accomplish to before receiving the belt is to break a stack of four wooden boards with their hand. In a recent attempt, my youngest hit the boards over and over without success until the instructor said, “Why don’t you stop and try with three boards instead?”
“I want to keep trying,” my son responded.
He kept at it and finally broke the stack of four. The instructor then turned it into a lesson on perseverance for the rest of the class.
Painful Emotions
In my own life, I lack such perseverance in the face of hard and difficult things. When something becomes too painful or challenging, I give up. I resist pain and heartache and difficulty. If I see a trial looming ahead, I turn and go the other way. When it comes to painful emotions, I do all that I can to control, ignore, cover up, hide from, or resist those emotions. Anything but actually face them and work through them.
But it is in working through them that I learn more about God, who he is, and what he is doing in me...to read the rest of this post, visit enCourage, my writing home today.
