My Words of Hope

And David encouraged himself in the Lord (1 Samuel 30:6)

Sometimes life hands you a bad day that only you can understand. I had one such day today. To give a little background, words carry a lot of weight in my life. I am the type of person who is likely to remember an offhand word that was said to me for many months (or years) after it was spoken. Now this is normally a good thing when positive words are spoken. When the words are negative. Probably not so much.

Back to my story. Here I was prepping for an important client meeting in the afternoon, of which my manager was to give important feedback and additional information on before the meeting. We had agreed on having a call earlier in the day so that by the time we got to the afternoon meeting, I would be ready with all the answers to the potential questions the client would have. As fate would have it, my manager was not in the country so we needed to connect via internet and this was the one day that all internet systems were offline. This meant that all the pre-reads I had prepared for my manager earlier on went undelivered and unread, and by the time we managed to connect and have the call, everyone was frustrated and very few positive things were said.

So here I was, about to go face my client, literally feeling like David with two stones in my hand. Only that, unlike David, my spirit had already been crushed by the conversation with my boss and if I had my way, I would have cancelled that meeting and gone home to nurse my wounds. Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with a legitimately acceptable excuse to cancel the meeting half an hour before and so on I went, with a sinking heart and legs feeling like lead.

As I was about to walk in God reminded me of something I had read during my devotional the night before. Reading the story of how the Israelites were delivered from Egypt, God had reassured Moses that he would be with him and that the Israelites would believe him when he told them that God spoke to him through the burning bush. And that was my reassurance, God would be with me. Someway, somehow he would get me through. And he did. All the questions the client asked, I was able to answer and together we built a solution that would meet their needs.

Isn’t God amazing? Sometimes all he needs is for us to be there as willing vessels and he will do the rest.

I’ve learned that sometimes we just need to encourage ourselves in the Lord like David did and he will give wisdom and strength to get through seemingly impossible situations.