Are You in a Battle?
Jane VanOsdol
The Lord of Hosts or Yahweh Sabaoth. What battles do you need the Lord to fight for you? At times, life can feel overwhelming. We may be going about what seems to be an ordinary day when WHAM! we get sidelined by a person, event, accident or situation we never saw coming. Or, it may be that we are in the middle of an ongoing battle with no end in sight.
Have you even been panicked or exhausted or ready to surrender? “How am I ever going to make it through this?” may be the thought that keeps running through your mind. Well, I found myself there in mid-June. One night at 10:10 p.m. as I was just getting into bed, my phone rang. I picked it up and my son’s girlfriend, obviously distraught, was trying to tell me something. I pieced together the following words: “Jesse,” “fire” and “burned.” Horrified, I realized she was telling me that my son had been burned at a bonfire, and they had called an ambulance.
I don’t know that I can even describe my feelings at that moment. I was so upset I had to force myself to try to think about what to do. My husband immediately took off to the friend’s house while I called my daughter and waited on her to drive home so that we could go together to the hospital.
About 15 minutes later, I heard the wail of sirens rush past my house, and a wave of nausea and grief hit me as I realized my son was in there, and I had no idea what shape he was in, even if he would live or die. Amber and I arrived at the hospital an hour later, and my husband prepared us for what we would see when we went back to be with Jesse. The sight of a person who has been burned in a fire is terrible, and I prayed for strength to be strong for him.
What battle are you facing right now that you need the Lord’s strength for? You may be outmanned, outgunned and overwhelmed, but you need to remember that the Lord of Hosts, the God of the armies of Israel (the words that David used against Goliath in 1 Samuel 17:45) is leading your battle when you call on Him. Our strength and skills may be insufficient to meet the situation or person facing us, but the situation or person is NOT bigger than God.
For the next week that Jesse was in the hospital, I relied on God’s strength to carry me through many heartrending days of painful treatments. I didn’t have the physical or emotional reserves I felt I needed, but God did, and He did not fail me.
I encourage you to call on God to lead you into your battle, whatever it may be. May your prayer be what David’s was as he charged onto the battlefield, “ You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin, but I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied” (1 Samuel 17:45). Pray on!