'If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses? If you stumble in safe country, how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan? Jeremiah 12:5, NIV

 

One Sunday morning, recently, I had an accident on my way to church – I collided with a car as it turned the corner, a family on their way to worship at a neighbouring church on the road next to ours.

 

Bizarrely, literally at the last stop sign before parking, the car had been totally obscured from my vision – even immediately after we collided – because of the early morning sun shining through the trees and dust, causing a glare. I wondered if I’d somehow drifted onto the other side of the small road and hit something on the pavement. It’s a shock enough to suddenly collide with something you didn’t know was there, but the fact that it was a small, quiet street, and that I had stopped and looked both ways before moving forward, perplexed me greatly.

 

Afterwards, in that moment of shock – of colliding with something I never saw coming, despite doing everything right – I wondered what God meant me to understand from it all.

 

Although a minor accident, it had disrupted the peace, and the joy of believers going to worship; I deeply regretted causing the upset. The driver of the other car behaved impeccably, graciously, with compassion, as did his wide-eyed family, and when we met again immediately after our respective Services, we were all clearly rejoicing in God’s healing Spirit, and I’d already, unwittingly, taken up God’s challenge to keep him my focus.

 

Perhaps today, God’s words to Jeremiah about his experience in another situation, many years ago, resonate?

 

Jeremiah had wearied himself with complaining to God about the prosperity of the wicked, looking with human eyes at what appeared to be an anomaly of God’s justice: “Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do the faithless live at ease? ... You are always on their lips but far from their hearts” (Jeremiah 12:1b,2b) while he, called by God, battles on.

 

God’s response wasn’t comfort but a challenge: “If you have raced with men on foot and they have worn you out, how can you compete with horses? If you stumble in safe country, how will you manage in the thickets by the Jordan?” (Jeremiah 12:5) Using what he considered relatively small things, God was preparing Jeremiah for greater challenges awaiting him, “competing with horses”, whether or not Jeremiah was comfortable with it.

 

Perhaps that’s what the small frustrations are for. God challenges us too. Not to break us, but to reveal where our trust is thin, and to strengthen it before the “thickets” come. For the believer the question isn’t whether or not we will face a “thicket”, it’s when. Is today’s footrace teaching us to trust God more or leaving us more depleted for the next?

 

Prayer: Lord, when small things unsettle me, teach me not to waste the moment, but to learn from it. Use my everyday frustrations to strengthen my trust in you that when greater trials come, I am not caught unprepared, but ready to run – with you. Amen.