It was clear to Doretha that her husband drank too much. But what could she do about it? Whenever she confronted him about his problem, he flew into a rage—which only made the drinking worse. Since there didn’t seem to be any viable options, Doretha simply tried to ignore the problem and concentrate on raising their son. She focused everything on motherhood.
Soon, that wouldn’t be an option either.
One autumn evening in 1995, Doretha’s husband was foolishly handling his gun while he was under the influence of alcohol. His hands slipped, the gun went off, and a bullet took the life of their son.
With her husband in jail, Doretha was left to the silence and despair of an empty house. She no longer had any real desire to live, but she was also afraid to die. A lifetime ago, at age thirteen, she had joined a church, but issues of life and death and eternity were all equal mysteries to her now.
Doretha remembers climbing into her car late at night and driving for hours in the hope that maybe she’d drift off to sleep and quickly be delivered from her waking nightmare. But something protected her every time. In the daylight, she began visiting churches. It was good medicine at the time, but the effects wore off when she left the sanctuary and reentered the roaring silence of her home.
What exactly are the limits to human tolerance? What are the units of measurement for pain and discouragement, and how does your discouragement threshold differ from mine?
I’m not sure about the answer to those questions, but the human spirit can be an amazing thing. Take the case of Lawrence Hanratty, who was named the “Unluckiest Man in New York City.” This poor fellow, profiled in the Los Angeles Times, was nearly electrocuted to death in a construction site accident in 1984. For weeks he lay in a coma, with his lawyers fighting for his disability claim—until one of them was disbarred and two of them died. Hanratty’s wife then ran off with her lawyer.
Hanratty later lost his car in a terrible crash. After the police had left the scene of the accident, criminals came along and robbed him. Then an insurance company fought to cut off his workers’ compensation benefits, and his landlord tried to evict him. He suffered from depression and agoraphobia. He required a canister of oxygen for breathing and took forty-two pills per day for his heart and liver ailments.
Talk about feeling like the world has turned upside down!
Still, all was not lost. A city councilman took up his cause. Neighbors began to rally around him. Incredibly, Lawrence Hanratty summed up his life this way: “There’s always hope.”1
Would you be able to talk about hope after a string of unthinkable calamities? Have you accentuated the positive and eliminated the negative during the low points of your life?
We know those words are true—there’s always hope—but sometimes it’s hard to believe them. All of us suffer through bouts of discouragement. The dictionary defines discourage as “to deprive of courage, to deter, to dishearten, to hinder.” All those D words—and you can throw in doom, depression, defeat, despair. The mind dwells on them when life has us pinned down.
The New Testament uses three Greek words to carry the idea of being disheartened, dispirited, or discouraged. We often translate them as “to faint” or “to lose heart.” For example, Paul warned us to take special care not to become the source of discouragement for our children: “Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged” (Colossians 3:21, emphasis added). And in 2 Corinthians 4:1, he spoke to those who may become disheartened in ministry: “Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we do not lose heart.” Later in that chapter, he encouraged us not to become discouraged as the “outward man” deteriorates because what’s inside us is being renewed daily (v. 16).
And we shouldn’t be discouraged by the plight of our loved ones, for in Ephesians 3:13, Paul wrote, “Do not lose heart at my tribulations for you.”
Jesus brought up the subject of discouragement in the context of prayer. “He spoke a parable to them,” Luke 18:1 tells us, “that men always ought to pray and not lose heart.” There’s so much truth in that verse. We must live and breathe and take up residence in prayer, or we’re sure to faint, to grow weary, to lose heart. It takes diligent faith to live above discouragement.
Lest you think this is purely a personal issue, remember that entire nations can run out of hope. It happened during the darkest days of Israel and Judah, when the invaders rolled in. The Babylonians destroyed the holy city of Jerusalem, looting its glories and carrying away its people to enslavement in a distant land. It seemed that God’s chosen people had lost it all—their land, their pride, their very identity as a nation set apart for a special destiny, for now God’s children were dispersed across the nations. These were the darkest times, days of lamentation and weeping and silence.
But as Lawrence Hanratty said, there’s always hope. A ruler named Cyrus the Persian came to power, and he gave permission for Jewish exiles to begin the homeward journey. In the time of the first return and the rebuilding of the temple, we think of two biblical heroes: a priest named Ezra and an administrator named Nehemiah. Each has a book of his own in our Bible, but there was a time when their two accounts were combined in one longer book.
Ezra was the priest to broken hearts, and Nehemiah was the rebuilder of broken dreams. The second one offers a liberating lesson for us about the renovation of hope from the rubble of discouragement. Let’s explore that story in greater detail as a powerful example of what it means to stand strong even in the face of discouragement.
The fourth chapter of Nehemiah’s book puts us in the middle of exciting times. Nehemiah, the gifted organizer, has arrived in a chaotic situation, but he has galvanized a community and jump-started the rebuilding operation. With the walls lying in ruins, the people of Israel haven’t had the luxury of peaceful sleep. Raiders from the outlying provinces have been able to attack by night and keep the Israelite settlers discouraged and fearful. This has been done very deliberately. The threat of a Hebrew revival is an unwelcome one to the neighbors; all this talk of rebuilding must be snuffed out.
Therefore, the Israelites have been under constant attack from every side—Sanballat and the Samaritans from the North, Tobiah and the Ammonites from the East, Geshem and the Arabs from the South, and the Ashdodites from the West. Nehemiah 4:8 tells us they’ve formed a kind of dark alliance to bring pressure on the construction workers. And the greatest weapons in their arsenal are fear and discouragement.
But God has different ideas. He has empowered his visionary servant Nehemiah in a mighty way; day by day, the work goes on. Brick by brick the walls are rising again. Here in the fourth chapter of Nehemiah, as we join the story, the work is halfway complete. The people can smell victory. And yet the wisdom of experience tells us that the midpoint is a precarious place to be. A bit less than half, or a bit more than half, isn’t so bad; but it’s dangerous to be exactly in the middle. Johnny Mercer’s old song “Accentuate the Positive” says, “Don’t mess with Mister In-Between.”2 That’s actually rather profound.
The Bible tells us that right in between, at the halfway point, a fresh wave of discouragement broke out through rumors of marauders and mayhem. Nehemiah realized that he must deal with the lagging spirits of his people. I think you’ll recognize that the principles he used haven’t changed. Nehemiah had to deal with discouragement in the same ways we do. As we review these principles, you’re likely to say, “Oh yes—I’ve been there; I’ve done that.”
Let’s discover how Nehemiah handled the problem.
Recognizing what makes us vulnerable to discouragment is the first step to keeping it at a distance. Here are four factors that can lead us to losing heart.
Vince Lombardi observed that “fatigue makes cowards of us all.” The wall-builders found that to be true. “The strength of the laborers is failing,” said Judah (Nehemiah 4:10).
The construction project required fifty-two days of backbreaking labor. Halfway finished, the workers had been going at it for a month. Fatigue was catching up with them, and when energy runs short, so does courage.
Haven’t you found this to be true? You’re working twelve-hour days, finishing the annual report. You’re working on weekends. Or you’re cleaning the house all day, then helping the kids with algebra homework at night. For a while you’ll rock along, doing what you feel you must. But sooner or later your personal limits will catch up with you. Every human body is governed by its own mathematical formula involving time, pressure, and exertion. If you exceed the limits of that equation, the cracks start to appear. You begin to be tense, irritable, and gloomy. Those are the times when your enemy, the devil, circles your name on his agenda.
As I’ve become older, I hope I’ve grown wiser. One little bit of wisdom I’ve grasped is that I can no longer push myself as hard as I used to. I’m an odd one to be lecturing to you on this topic, for I’ve always been a type A personality. I doubt that will change. But these days I see the importance of pacing myself. I need to build a little more margin in my life, and I need to protect those margins; otherwise, if I push too hard for too long, I’m going to see diminishing returns on the investment of my time and talents—and then comes the deluge of discouragement.
That certainly happened in Jerusalem. The people were weary, discouraged, and one other thing—they were frustrated.
We’ve just seen Judah’s complaint in the first part of verse 10, when he observed that the workers’ strength was failing. He continued, “There is so much rubbish that we are not able to build the wall.”
Have you ever worked for days and weeks on mundane details, then stepped back and wondered if your efforts had any significance? Tired as they were, the Israelites no longer saw the proud, gleaming walls of their dreams. Visions of glory seemed like a mirage in the desert. There was nothing but broken bricks, mud, and debris. The tenth verse records that they were suddenly frustrated with the ever-present rubbish and rubble of heavy construction. Have you ever noticed how ugly a building site can be? There will be a sign with a beautiful painting of a glass tower, sparkling in the sunshine—and behind the sign is an ugly hole in the mud. At Jerusalem, the old walls had been torched. Now there were great piles of worthless debris everywhere.
The frustration of those endless mountains of rubble was weighing on Nehemiah’s people. They would nearly collapse in weariness as the sun went down. Then, arriving for work the next morning, it would appear to them as if nothing had been accomplished. It seemed as if the debris had a life of its own and was multiplying. They were burned out.
That’s a buzzword of our times: burnout. We all use it. In past generations, a man might work his entire adult life at one trade for one employer, then retire after fifty years with the gold watch; if he ever felt “burned out” along the way, there wasn’t the word to articulate it. Today, we’re always shifting careers and pointing to burnout. I’ve heard it said there are three ways to live: you can live out, you can wear out, or you can burn out. I’m hoping to live out, and I’m sure you’ll agree that’s the best alternative.
But we need to define this concept of burnout with care. I hear people use the word to mean working too hard. That’s not a definition of burnout. Many of my friends work hard and energetically without ever burning out, because they work with focus and perspective. They have something called vision, and they move forward toward attainable goals.
The true nature of burnout is working too hard at the wrong thing. It’s striving for a goal you can’t accomplish—perhaps a goal no one can accomplish. Burnout is pulling the whole weight uphill all by yourself, reaching the summit, and realizing you’re only going to topple to the bottom to start all over again. It’s a feeling of despondency, and Nehemiah’s workers were suffering from rubbish burnout. They couldn’t see the picture of the shining city, only the debris. In a word, they were frustrated.
Nehemiah 4:10 tells us so much. “The strength of the laborers is failing [fatigue], and there is so much rubbish [frustration] that we are not able to build the wall [failure].”
The Israelites threw up their hands here and pronounced their failure. Fatigue and frustration are a good recipe for failure. “We’re tired,” they said. “We’re fed up. We can’t do this. It was a great idea, but we’ve been at it for a month and we can’t take any more.” Negative talk was infectious, spreading like a virus to infect a community.
Importantly, Nehemiah’s people hadn’t failed at all, but it appeared that way to them. Failure is one of life’s giants, so let’s look at it as a force for discouragement.
Failure is universal. Every human being who has ever lived—with one exception, two thousand years ago—has succumbed to failure. What makes the difference is how we handle our failure. The great danger is in letting our negative thoughts and impressions be compounded by the adversity we suffer. When things go wrong we’re more willing to give an ear to the Enemy, the world’s greatest de-motivational speaker, and we slowly but surely begin to buy into his lies and distortions.
“I haven’t accomplished anything at all,” we murmur. “I’m a failure.”
Read the words of Nehemiah 4:11–12: “And our adversaries said, ‘They will neither know nor see anything, till we come into their midst and kill them and cause the work to cease.’ So it was, when the Jews who dwelt near them came, that they told us ten times, ‘From whatever place you turn, they will be upon us.’”
We explored this topic of fear in the first chapter, but fear has something to do with discouragement too. Imagine the weary workers in Jerusalem, building their walls in the midst of all the ugly rubble. The job was grueling enough, but there was also the matter of these neighbors stopping by to put a word in their ear. These visitors were saying, “We’ve got a few surprises in store for you. You won’t know when, you won’t know how, but just when you least expect it, we’ll slip in and kill you. And we’ll take you out by increments, one by one, until the walls stand half-built with no one left to complete them.”
Nothing derails the work of God’s people like a negative word. Everyone who tries to serve the Lord knows the truth of this. I receive my fair share of critical letters. Someone hears me on the radio, or someone sees something we’ve published, and they attack. It goes with the territory of having a large ministry. But it’s interesting to me how the Enemy always knows just when to put one of those letters on my desk. They come in times of struggle. They come at the In-Between Moment, when we’re just about to regain our focus and move forward for God’s kingdom again.
That’s when the venomous words always materialize from some quarter. We’re tempted to say, “So that’s how people feel. Well, maybe I ought to just turn in my Bible and quit.”
Criticism is toxic. Perhaps you’re coping with it right now. Perhaps the bitter words of others are eroding your spirit in the workplace or even your home. Perhaps there are people who play on your fears until you become very discouraged.
Now that we’ve recognized all the factors that lead to discouragement, how can we respond?
“Hear, O our God, for we are despised; turn their reproach on their own heads, and give them as plunder to a land of captivity! Do not cover their iniquity, and do not let their sin be blotted out from before You; for they have provoked You to anger before the builders . . . Nevertheless we made our prayer to our God.”
—Nehemiah 4:4–5, 9
In the midst of discouragement, Nehemiah cried out to God. That was his first solution for keeping the faith and leading others to press forward when it seemed like their world was being turned upside down.
I’m going to make a radical suggestion to you. Next time you encounter some major setback in your life, reverse your usual procedure—that is, cry out to God first instead of last. Most of us wait until we’ve exhausted all other alternatives before appealing to God as a last resort. I don’t know about you, but I grit my teeth when I hear someone say, “We’ve tried everything; now all we can do is pray.”
Don’t wait until last to look up. When discouragement comes, start at the top! Go to the Lord and ask Him to help you sort through all the issues. May I tell you what works for me in times of discouragement? I sit down with my computer and my journal and I begin to talk to God. I say, “Lord, I need to talk with You right now. Some things are going on in my life that I can’t understand, and I’m having a hard time with it. I need to tell You about it.”
For me, it helps to begin setting the issues down in writing as I verbalize my feelings to God. As I do this, something begins to change in my spirit.
First of all, I bring everything out of that dark “anxiety closet” into the light. Writing it down and reading it out loud brings clarity. I discover that things weren’t quite the way I thought when they were smoldering within me. I’ve imposed order on them, examined them in the light.
Second, I’ve done as Nehemiah did—I’ve cried out to God. This is the most important thing. Sometimes we just need to let go, be a child, and cry out to our heavenly Father. That brings the innocence and dependence that are the beginning of wisdom. Doing so cuts through our discouragement. If you don’t think this is a very spiritual approach, read through the psalms. When David was beset by worries (and he was beset by a multitude of them), he did exactly what I’ve prescribed. He wrote them down and cried them out. He was brutally honest about his discouragement, and you can be too.
So we built the wall, and the entire wall was joined together up to half its height, for the people had a mind to work.
—Nehemiah 4:6
Why is it that our immediate reaction to adversity is to quit? Like the angry little boy on the playground, we take our ball and go home. People leave churches; they quit jobs; they walk away from marriages—all because they’ve encountered the predictable season of discouragement. And of course, that’s the worst thing we can do. We always come to regret our emotional walkouts. Satan knows that if he can play on our emotions and get us to quit, he can keep the problem from being resolved. He can keep God’s work from moving forward.
But take a look at Nehemiah. He felt all the discouragement of his people, but he never set down the trowel, never missed a beat in laying the next brick. He knew he had to keep on keeping on. Yes, there were problems to deal with—but he wasn’t going to set aside the mandate God had given him. “The people had a mind to work,” the Scriptures tell us. Nehemiah helped them see that productive labor is sometimes just what the doctor ordered. It’s healthy and therapeutic to work off our frustration, even when life seems upside down. Maybe especially when life seems upside down.
Needless to say, continuing to press forward is also a great way to bring a little discouragement to the Enemy. Later on in the rebuilding process, Sanballat and Geshem tried one more stunt to make Nehemiah slow down on his work. They invited him to a conference. Anyone in the business world will tell you that conferences and committees are great ways to slow down productivity! I’ve always loved Nehemiah’s comeback. “So I sent messengers to them, saying, ‘I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down. Why should the work cease while I leave it and go down to you?’” (Nehemiah 6:3).
Modern translation: “Please accept my regrets, but God’s agenda outweighs yours right now.” The main thing is to keep the main thing as the main thing. We need to have a firm grasp on what God called us to do, put on the blinders, and keep plugging away. As we’ve seen, clear goals are the best preventive maintenance for burnout.
No matter how devastated you may feel, no matter how down in the dumps your spirit may be, keep up the good work. Keep the faith. Experience leads me to believe that the times we least feel like working are the times we most certainly should. Emotions are treacherous advisers. We need to be disciplined and stay on task. Nehemiah knew his people didn’t need to bail; they needed to build. They didn’t need to walk; they needed to work. When we follow their example, our discouragement will have a way of sorting itself out.
Therefore I positioned men behind the lower parts of the wall, at the openings; and I set the people according to their families, with their swords, their spears, and their bows. And I looked, and arose and said to the nobles, to the leaders, and to the rest of the people, “Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, great and awesome, and fight for your brethren, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses.”
—Nehemiah 4:13–14
Nehemiah’s men were fanned out across the perimeter, working on little sections of the wall—and that was part of the problem. They were so separated that they couldn’t communicate and encourage one another. They could see only their own little hole in the wall, their own little pile of rubbish. It was very difficult to maintain any perspective.
We, too, tend to reduce the world to the cubicles we work in. “A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world,” said John le Carré. Your cubicle may not have a window, but you can always keep one wide-open in your spirit. Open it to God. Open it to others. Hold on to the Big Picture. Nehemiah’s workers were down and out. The muddy bricks and old debris made a discouraging picture, but only a few steps back and a little imagination upward revealed a portrait of the New Jerusalem. You may see nothing but drudgery in your life; you need to see what He is doing in you, with you, and for you. You need to hold on to that hope. It will help you prevail in the darkest of times.
Nehemiah 4 shows how Nehemiah handled the problem. He positioned the people along the wall in rows. Suddenly they could see the unity of their workforce, the proud line standing firm along the walls. Can you see a mental picture of that? Now the workers could see that every man meant one more section of the wall under repair. Add it all up, and the total was a new city.
I once saw a cartoon filled with a crowd of hundreds of little characters packed together, all looking perplexed, all with identical thought bubbles above their heads, countless thought bubbles, all reading, “What can one man do?” From our side of the cartoon panel we can see how ludicrous that is. Each little man is in his own private torment, and yet they’re not only an “each”—they’re an army, if only they could see it. Don’t let the Enemy isolate you.
Erma Bombeck is sorely missed. For thirty years she wrote a popular syndicated newspaper column, published fifteen books, received numerous awards, appeared regularly on Good Morning America, and gave a great voice to millions of people. I miss that voice, for it brought laughter and hope to all of us. But few of her admirers were aware of the sufferings she experienced. She had breast cancer, a mastectomy, and kidney failure. She worked through her trials, one by one, and maintained her grasp of the Big Picture. She once wrote,
I speak at college commencements, and I tell everyone I’m up there and they’re down there—not because of my successes but my failures. Then I proceed to spin all of them off—a comedy record album that sold two copies in Beirut . . . a sitcom that lasted about as long as a doughnut in our house . . . a Broadway play that never saw Broadway . . . book signings where I attracted two people: one who wanted directions to the restroom and the other who wanted to buy the desk. What you have to tell yourself is this: “I’m not a failure. I failed at doing something.” There’s a big difference . . . Personally and career-wise, it’s been a corduroy road. I’ve buried babies, lost parents, had cancer and worried over kids. The trick is to put it all in perspective . . . and that’s what I do for a living.3
She did it very well; that’s why we loved her so deeply. She made us laugh at ourselves and think about life in perspective. She made us look up for a moment from the little holes in the walls that define our piece of geography. She helped us remember we’re all a part of something bigger.
Pastor and futurist Leith Anderson wrote the following in his book Leadership That Works:
In the heat of a tough leadership battle it is easy to lose hope, become pessimistic, and convince ourselves of defeat. . . . But as Christians we must open our eyes to see the view from where Jesus sits. . . . When I am discouraged and my hope runs thin, I remember that I am part of something much bigger than I am, and much more important than the local church of which I am a part. I belong to the church of Jesus Christ, and the gates of Hell will not overcome it (Matthew 16:18). Seeing the worldwide kingdom of God, not just my little corner of it, is enormously encouraging to me. It builds my faith and strengthens my hope.4
From there, Anderson details example after example of good things coming to pass in the world because of Christ and His church. He takes us on a quick journey across the globe, and we see the many countries where souls are coming to salvation at phenomenal rates.5
The world is filled with voices of discouragement, but there is one place where we can always go to be uplifted.
“Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, great and awesome, and fight for your brethren, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses.”
—Nehemiah 4:14
In times of discouragement, run—don’t walk—to the Word of God. You may hear yourself say something like, “I’m too low for Bible reading today. My heart wouldn’t be in it.” That’s the point! When your heart is ailing, it needs a transfusion of hope and power. I tell people to learn the principle of force-feeding: get the book out, open it up, sit yourself down, tune your mind in, and read the Word aloud. These are practical things you can do; don’t wait for your feelings, for you can act your way into feeling more easily than you can “feel” your way into acting.
I know how hard that can be. I have those mornings when my spirits are at low ebb as I approach my appointment with God. I speak to Him very frankly: “Lord, I need something special from You today. I’m going through a rough place here. I want more than words on a page; more than ideas and spiritual concepts. I need You. I need Your voice. And so I’m asking You to meet me in Your Word today, Lord.”
There are also times when I’ve said, “I refuse to put this Book down until I hear from You, Lord.” Don’t you think He’s pleased by your yearning to know Him? He’s going to answer you if you approach with a determined heart. He’s going to help you see just what you need to see in His Word, and He’s going to give you the grace that will help you prevail through the bumps in the rocky road of life.
Remember, the Bible is no ordinary book. God’s Spirit dwells in its pages, and He wants you to find Him in passages like this one:
God is our refuge and strength,
A very present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear,
Even though the earth be removed,
And though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;
Though its waters roar and be troubled,
Though the mountains shake with its swelling.
—Psalm 46:1–3
We can run to the New Testament too. In 2 Thessalonians 3:13, we discover that it’s possible to become discouraged even while doing all the right things: “But as for you, brethren, do not grow weary in doing good.” Those words grow weary carry the meaning of discouragement. This is a remarkable idea and one I find very helpful. You may be out visiting the sick, engaging in prison ministry, teaching Sunday school, working with needy people, or any other good deed. You may be serving Christ with all your heart and still become discouraged. The Bible says don’t grow weary in your service.
And why? Look to Galatians 6:9 for the answer. “And let us not grow weary while doing good,” that verse repeats, then adds, “for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart”—that is, if we do not become discouraged. You see, we find ourselves feeling low because we’ve lost perspective about whom we’re serving, why we’re doing it, and how God plans to reward us. We need to remember the reaping.
Don’t lose sight of those things. Run to God’s Word, keep your nose in the Book, and draw the strength you need to keep the faith and keep running your race.
Let’s come back to Nehemiah and his massive renovation project. If we read a bit further into the fourth chapter, we’ll find something very moving. We’ll find a pattern of people helping one another.
Nehemiah’s band of stragglers, the remnant of fallen Israel, had bonded together to become a team. They were unified in commitment. Some were carrying, some were guarding, some were building, and all of them were wearing swords. The final word of this passage is that they stayed up all night; they were too caught up in their work to go home for the evening. Nehemiah told us they didn’t even change clothes except for washing. United we stand. They understood that if they were to prevail, they’d need to watch one another’s backs. They’d need to help the weaker ones carry and help the shorter ones reach. They’d need to fill in for those who were older and wearier. They carried one another’s burdens.
Discouragement tends to cut us off from doing this. It sends us inward, where pity parties are common and perspective is rare. How often I’ve forgotten my own little worries when I’ve been busy calling on someone who was sick or making my rounds at the hospital. Going in, I’ve told God that I had nothing to give these people; coming out, I’ve felt abundantly blessed. Our own burdens become lighter when we’ve been carrying the burdens of others. That’s the way God planned things. He doesn’t want you to bear your own load. He wants you to join a burden-bearing community. He wants you to be entrenched in a network of encouragement.
Do you need encouragement right now? My best advice to you is to go encourage someone else. Are you caught up in your own needs? Go fill the needs of others. You’ll reap what you sow, and the love you give will return to you.
But some people have actually told me, “I don’t know anyone who needs encouragement.” Would you like to know the very best place to find them? In your church.
Fred Smith, a businessman, asked a church usher about his responsibilities. The man said, “Nothing more than being there, shaking hands, finding my place in the aisle, taking the offering, and showing up for an occasional ushers meeting.” Smith thought this didn’t sound very biblical, but he observed in the conversation that this man had a passion about the ministry of hospitality. So many people come to church filled with cares and anxiety, the usher had noticed, and they need a warm handshake, a listening ear, perhaps a hug. The man had found his place to serve God quietly but profoundly.6
This weekend, make it a project to go to church simply as an encourager. Ask God to direct your steps to someone who needs a dose of love.
When the world seems upside down, look for burdens to bear. You’ll find your heart lifted. Pull your eyes away from the discouragement you feel, and place them on the courage others have shown—others like Doretha, whose husband shot her son in a drunken accident. There were many dark months before she came to the end of her despair. One evening at midnight it all came crashing in on her. She fell to her knees in her bedroom and called out, “Lord, help me! I’m tired of living this miserable life.” It seemed as if the weight of the world had been on her shoulders. But having called out to God, she felt a certain dizziness. There was something different inside her; she knew she could sleep, and that’s what she did—deeply, restfully. She began the next day as a new creature. She felt so much lighter that she actually looked in the mirror to see if she’d lost weight. Her shape was the same as always; it was her face that was new. It glowed.
Doretha couldn’t comprehend the newness of things. She wanted to understand the change that had come across her, but she was a bit embarrassed to ask. In a little secondhand bookshop she found a book entitled Here’s Hope: Jesus Cares for You—The New Testament. That word hope seemed to leap out at her. That’s what was different about today. She took the book home with her and began to read hungrily. It wasn’t long before she came across these words: “Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28).
“God changed my whole life,” Doretha told me, “mended my broken heart, saved my husband in jail, brought me and my husband closer together, showed us how to love and be loved—and not to take life for granted. Jesus is the hope of the world. God still answers prayer.”
God brought Doretha and her husband into blessed light from the deepest of holes, and I have no doubt He can do the same for you. The depth of the hole can never compare to the depth of His love, the reach of His arms, and the height of His glory.
Let’s come into those arms, all of us who are heavy-laden, and feel the lightness of casting our burdens down, until our faces shine with the brightness of Doretha’s.