The Fight

Over the past week, I have have found myself getting knocked down, getting up just to get knocked down again. Really I imagine it much like a classic fight scene in a movie. You know the one where the two guys are fighting and as soon as one throws a good blow, he's returned one back in the gut, and it continues over and over again? Ya, that's been my life. Last week I had four tests, and I know I have no place to complain because I guarantee you, there are hundreds of students in the same position as me with several difficult tests, papers to write, and all sorts of nonsense that college professors throw at us and laughingly walk away as we try to juggle it all. I will admit, I am becoming a better juggler, but I still struggle as a test taker. One by one, each test I took gave me a good punch in the gut, until finally on Thursday I was on my knees, done with the fight. Especially after the punch Organic Chemistry gave me, you might just call that one a black out, but I'm not saying these things for pity, or for you to feel sorry for me. I'm saying it because that's what life does. It gives us several hard punches, and then it's up to us how we go about fighting. I'm guilty of sometimes giving us, and throwing a Katelyn Pity Party for one, because sometimes I don't understand why or what I'm fighting for. Then there are the days where I like to give life a big punch back in the face, like today, where I wrote three lab reports, made a 100 on a quiz, and finally managed to pick a topic for a disease research paper. Days like today are easy, but in a college world the problem is that these good days don't come as often as the stressful days. The days where we feel inadequate, where we struggle to pass, get to class, and even struggle to see the good.

And that's a problem. When we forget to see the good, when we forget to see how GREAT our God is and we forget to see blessings and not problems, we fall. We fall right into a self-pity party for one. A party so overwhelmed by the ways of the world that we forget to turn to God for help. Lately I have been reading through the book of Isaiah. What my focus has been is taking some of the prophets from the Old Testament, and looking at how they dealt with life. Let's be honest, life has never been easy for anyone, and so why not use the greatest book of all time to learn to navigate it better? Anyway, as I was reading through Isaiah 66, what I took from this chapter is somewhat a stretch, but I truly think it applies to every single one of us. God will not cause pain, without allowing something to be born of it. We all go through hard times, through hard tests, or even struggling as medical tests come back and they aren't what we had hoped, what we had been praying for for months. We all get bad news from our friends, we all have reason upon reason to be discouraged. But God promises us that he will be there for us. He will hold our hand as we navigate through life's punches, and if we allow him to, he will show us the good in the bad.

God is good all the time, was a saying I had my campers repeatedly say every day at Deer Run this summer, and I foolishly forgot it myself. But today I remembered. I remembered that God is good, even if I failed an organic test. God is good because today he humbled me, and helped me realize that once again I have found myself trying to make MY plans for my future His, when it should be the other way around. God is good, because he always provides. God is good because he does comfort me when I feel like I can't take life's punches, and he provides me the strength to fight back. God is SO good, and I have forgotten to take time to realize that. No matter the punches life throws at us, our God is still bigger and is still better than them all. He is the ultimate fighter, and his son died for us so that we could spend an eternity with him.

Now, tell me that news doesn't build you up and give you the strength you need to make it through tomorrow? I know that I'm ready to keep fighting, because my God is good, and if I allow him too, he will show me his goodness in all things.