Being Joyful in Hard Times

Bruce Kendall Barnard

learned a lot of lessons over the years owning a boat – one was that the two best days you own a boat are the day you buy it, and the day you sell it! All the days in between are just days when you take cash out of your wallet and throw it into the hull of the boat!

It was the start of spring and time to open our boat for the summer. So we picked it up from where it had been stored, uncovered it, and took it to the car wash for cleaning/vacuuming. We noticed a ton of “stuff” in there like leaves, pine needles, and small pieces of trash that we hadn’t seen before, but figured we’d just missed it. So we started the vacuum, and opened up the back hatch to see what we thought was water in the bow–it turned out to be gasoline. Squirrels had gnawed into the gas tank, along with all the lines, and insulation. The cost to repair was $2,800. We threw a lot of money into the hull on that day.

Did you ever have a season like that, where if anything could go wrong, it did—that in the midst of a crisis, or suffering, or tragedy, you couldn’t see any way out? But looking back later, you learned something? The truth is we all have difficult experiences in our lives. Doubt reigns supreme, and we sometimes can’t find relief or see any way out of whatever it is we’re facing. The Apostle James understood this. He wrote:

“Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you face trials of many kinds,

because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.” (James 1:2, 3)

The Greek phrase James uses is “pasan charan”– it means FULL and COMPLETE JOY. It means to decide to have a joyful attitude in all things. Why? Because as James points out, in doing so we are strengthened and our endurance becomes full and complete. It’s a level of spiritual maturity not everyone achieves easily, but it is a level of spiritual maturity we all need to try to reach.

I recently read a book by Marcus Luttrell entitled, Lone Survivor. It’s a story about a Navy Seal who was dropped into Afghanistan with a team of other Seals. He writes of being surrounded by the Taliban and his entire team is pinned down and eventually killed (not before those Seals killed more than 70 Taliban). Marcus miraculously escaped, and literally crawled 7 miles to a safe village where he was eventually rescued. He credits his survival to his training. No one just walks through Seal training. It’s a grueling process of forever-long swims, running with logs over their heads—crazy stuff. But it was that training that got him through the battle; the training process prepared him for what he would endure later. It’s that discipline that saw him through, and it’s that discipline that sees us through our spiritual battles.

Let me be clear – you and I cannot survive everything that comes our way by simply thinking positively. We must prepare for those battles by training in the good times. How do we prepare? Listen to Paul’s suggestion: “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:6, 7)

Paul urged his friends to pray for things big and small. When we do that, hope comes alive; hope is like oxygen for our soul. I think we’ve done a disservice to the concept of “hope,” using it to mean almost anything – we hope for better weather; we hope our team wins. But hope is more than just wishful thinking; it’s true confidence that God is in control from start to finish! Our hope in God includes more than those times when things are good. It includes those times when trials come our way – it’s when we’re unemployed; or our marriage is failing; or that diagnosis isn’t what we’d prayed it would be; or we have teenagers making bad decisions about their lives, their sexuality, their choice to “try” things.

How do we find this joy—this hope? We have a decision to make, a choice – we can choose to make a decision that will result in leaning away from God, or we can choose to lean towards God, toward hope. The song writer called it, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.” Sing it with me now.