Each day during the month of March we will be sharing a devotional from a booklet written by Steve Love. Steve is a member of Canton First and a Traumatic Brain Injury survivor. If you would like a complete PDF of this devotional, it can be downloaded here.
Day 29
Psalm 73:26 (New International Version)
My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
Asaph a Levite and one of the leaders of David’s choir wrote this Psalm. “My flesh and my heart may fail,” Asaph notes how weak our flesh and our heart/mind and how it is prone to failure. As human beings we do not have the strength or the knowledge to successful 100% of the time. Try as we want, we are going to fail and most likely letting someone down who is counting on us. Asaph understood this fact.
Has there been a time in your live where your “heart was in the right place” but what you were doing fail? The saying “heart was in the right place” is something people tell us knowing we meant to do something positive, but we could not do it no matter what we did. Failure is part of life. How do you handle your failures in life?
Failure for some gives them an ague to give up. Before I have only my brain injury, I had dyslexia. We know about dyslexia today and most schools have programs to help the children who have dyslexia. When I was in public school, I struggle to pass my classes. I knew I was smart, but I could not spell or write. When talking to my high school counselor about going on the college. His words still ring in my ears today. He told me that, I was “too dumb to go to college.” I should “go and get a job as a janitor and be happy with my life.” I went to college class were hard it took me five years to get a C in freshman comp to pass the course. I had the case to given up and drop out of college every time I fail that class. If I did, I would not have my college degree today.
There are times when failure happen in life one can not overcome. We do not have the knowledge to fits everything in life. Something just can not be repairer no matter how hard we try. There are times when thing is out of our control and someone else must solve the problem. We just must wait. We can not force someone to behave the way we believe how they will act or respond in any given situation. Then time just runs out before we can find the solution. It is in times like this we can understand Asaph was saying when he wrote, “My flesh and my heart may fail.”
Asaph gives us the answer to handle these times is our life. “God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” God is the answer. When God touches our heat/mind/soul; He give us the strength we need to help us when things of out of our control. Every one of us needs God’s strength when brain injury became part of our lives. Life gave us something we had no knowledge to fully understand what was happing. Someone else was given the problem of making designs on our behalf. Life has change for us and we were just alone for the ride. In these times of life, we need the strength that God alone can give us.
Not only can we have the strength of God, but Asaph tells us that He is “my portion forever.” My portion is personal; it tells us that we can have God as part of our life forever. We might not be able to handle what life troughs at us but we can have God’s strength and know that He is a personal part of our lives forever. We need to turn everything over to Him. Like Asaph we know it is beyond our abilities to fix things, but God can and He can help us to exact the things we can not change. He is there for us forever apart of our lives.
Pray and thank God for Him being apart of our lives, helping us to handle the problems and difficulty we that happens to us.
Pray and thank God for the strength He gives us to live life even with the problems that might come our way.
Pray and God to help not to look at our problems we face until we look to Him and put our trust that He will help to face them and deal with them.