Christian Living

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Larry Lilly's Letter Monday August 7, 2006

Our part of the country has been so hot that one wag said, "The trees are whistling for the dogs to come on over."

The apparent point of the above and numerous other sayings about the weather have to do with the reality that stress changes things and does so often in a very dramatic fashion. It is a well known fact that in some cases we frail humans do things under stress that in normal circumstances we would not do. A plane crashes in the Andes Mountains and the surviving passengers, college students, resort to cannibalism to stay alive. The world was shocked when this was reported, books were written and movies were made as civilization was confronted again with the truth that we are not all that civil when we get down to where the rubber meets the road.

Over the course of my adult life which has been invested for the most part in what we ignorantly call "The Lord's service" forgetting that whatever God has called us to do is in fact His service, I have heard a phrase repeated over and again by men and a few women who certainly know better, but lapse into a demonstration of our lack of understanding the Lord. Certainly this not meant to say that I above all the struggling humans of the earth do fully understand the mysteries of our Lord Jesus. The phrase is simple:

"The Lord tests us to find out what we are made of."

That a thousand variations of the above abound no one would doubt. Being the simple minded country boy that Mom raised, I asked myself one day, "If God made me, and I'm sure that He did, why doesn't He already know what I am made of?" I then discovered that He is on record as already knowing that I, Larry Lilly, am but dust.

So, why the test?

The Lord knows that we humans learn best from experience and it is through experience that we come to the sure knowledge of our human limitations. Once we have accepted the frailty of our humanity, we are then in a position at the emotional level to learn to trust the Lord, to depend upon His power in times of mind bending stress, to not only survive, but to prevail.

The best manual for victory over stress is the Bible. The scriptures make it plain that man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, meaning that the ideal, stress free life, promised by many religious and non-religious people is a myth. Failure to learn to cope with stress on a regular basis guarantees a less than fulfilled life.

I am one of those humans who have learned to cope with the big things in life and fly right on through the major storms of life trusting in the Lord. I am a glaring failure in coping with the 'Little Foxes' the small, frustrating nonsensical burrs under the saddle. "If the ship is sinking, why are rearranging the deck chairs?"

You get the idea.

Larry Lilly Copyright © 2006 Use with credit.

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