Self Made

Mrs. Spivey was an older woman who lived a few houses down from me when I was in junior high. She was retired, but delivered the evening paper for extra income. She asked me if I wanted to work for her and make $45 a month folding papers on her route. I would go over after school and sit in the back seat of her car and fold up the papers while she delivered them. It made her afternoon go by faster and it was easy income for me.

I remember one afternoon in particular when we were out on our route. We had done our prep work and were pulling up to our first house. From my spot in the back seat I heard a loud thud and then wild laughter from Mrs. Spivey. I jerked my head up to see what had happened and heard through her cackles, “I forgot to roll the window down!” No matter how hard she tried to deliver that paper her own window being rolled up was going to prohibit that desire.

When we face obstacles to our progress, we can often fall into the trap of blaming other people or even giving credit to satan for messing with us. If we examined things a bit more closely, I think we might find much of that interference is of our own making. We have allowed our past to hinder our forward progress, have neglected to work diligently, or created new stumbling blocks in our own mind. No forward progress can be made until we remove the obstacle we’ve put in our own path.

Obstacle Course

No journey in life will be entirely free of obstacles. Regardless of how strong our resolve might be, there will be moments of difficulty to challenge our progress. In the face of these trials we are essentially left with two options: find a way to overcome the challenge in front of us or give up.

Why do we choose to conquer or run away? Is this something that is too difficult or do we just not want to do the hard work of figuring it out? Struggling through the process of finding a solution brings a satisfaction avoidance cannot bring. We'll never see a new pathway without persevering.

Overcome

I was thinking about the word "overcome" this morning and how we use it to describe trials of life. It can sometimes be casually tossed around to describe all difficult seasons when it really only applies to those that we tackle head-on. We can't avoid adversity and claim to have overcome it. It's not possible to steer clear of (necessary) conflict and talk about how we overcame a problem. 

If you imagine your life as a trail through the woods and difficult circumstances as something blocking that path, you are left with two choices:

1. Jump off of the path, find another route, and refuse to deal with what's in front of you. You can circumvent the direct issue, but you didn't really handle it--you found a way around it that ignored it. It might be possible to find a non-confrontational way around it, but there will be problems in finding your way back to the right path once you're past it.

2. Recognize the huge obstacle in the middle of your path and choose to find a way over over it. This choice isn't easy--it might be covered in barbed wire, be bigger than we first anticipated, and exhaust us more than we thought. Moving forward is an aggressive way to keep moving in the right direction. 

It's the second choice that builds strength in us while revealing fortitude we might not have realized we had. Once we've overcome it (with God's strength being our fuel) we'll be able to look back and realize exactly what's been conquered. There won't be any confusion about finding the right path again--we're still on it and more resolute about keeping our footing sure for our future.