Facing the Hordes

All too often fear sneaks through an unlocked door and takes up residence where it can no longer be ignored.   Most often, it stands by my bedside, waiting for me to stir in the middle of the night.  And then, it pounces.  In the dark, it is hard to decipher what is only an illusory monster under my bed.  Those amazingly irrational fears cast the biggest shadows.  They are the hardest to eradicate because, like spiders, hit one and a hundred more take its place.  

There are those days when it feels like a multitude of barbaric warriors have you surrounded.  As Oswald Chambers once prayed, “I seem to be paralysed by my own littleness…”  At these times, we want to hide in the closet at the very moment we should be heading out the door.  But perhaps the awareness of our own littleness should be, instead, a cry out to God, an awareness of His enormity.  One afternoon this summer when I was wallowing in a moment of dismay and praying for help, outside the window I heard the voice of my little granddaughter singing on the porch, “My God is so BIG, so strong and so mighty, there is nothing my God cannot do.”  Literally, God spoke to me through the mouth of a babe.  To whom am I listening?  To fear?  To my own littleness?  Or to the Creator of the Universe?

This problem is nothing new.  Indeed, the Bible is FULL of what I call “God’s little pep talks.”  This morning, I read one of them.  God may not take me out of a battle or sticky situation, but He can still deliver me in its midst.  It is all in how you look at the TRUTH of the matter, not a perversion of it.  This summer I watched three girls, about ages 8 to 10, playing in a shallow creek.  All of a sudden, they started screaming at the top of their lungs “a SNAKE!!!” and took refuge on the top of a large flat rock until their father came to their rescue.   He reached down into the water and pulled out the problem.  The littlest turned to the girl who started screaming first and confronted her, “We were scared of a STICK?!?!”   God has a way of deflating those fears back to reality.  Take courage, my friend.  And know Who is with you.

Be strong and of good courage.

Do not be afraid or dismayed before the king of Assyria

and all the horde that is with him,

for there is One greater with us than with him.

With him is an arm of flesh,

but with us is the LORD our God,

to help us and to fight our battles. 

                     2 Chronicles 32. 7-8