When You Want to Throw in the Towel

It’s all looked a little impossible lately. It’s more than the lists, and the mail stacks, and the bulging inboxes, and the deadlines. Yes, there are plenty of all those.

But there’s more: people we love are hurting. And we are hurting with them. Friends are staring down mean diagnoses and long roads and uncertain tomorrows.

Our 11-year-old daughter, Lydia, knows some of it because she reads the back of our church bulletin, with its long list of typed prayer needs. She hears my sides of phone conversations, and she reads newspaper headlines over my shoulder. At night, when the moon rises outside her window, we talk about the trouble in this world. She pulls up the covers under her chin.

I can tell by the quiver in her voice that she feels like life has had handed out one too many lemons.

“It all looks so … impossible, Mom.”

And sometimes, she admits, it makes you want to give up praying. I nod my head in the dark, because I’ve felt in my gut what she’s trying to put words to.

But I told her right then: When you want to throw in the towel, throw your problems on a nail instead.

Which is what we did — and what we do, every night and every morning and every noon. We pray together, tossing our worries on Calvary nails.

That night, I tucked her in, then walked out of her room in the dark, and stepped squarely onto the truth with my right foot. I stepped onto a tiny spike — long lost from our set of Easter resurrection eggs. It poked into my heel. The sharp spike had been buried for months in the deep carpet fibers of her bedroom. (That says a lot about my vacuuming regimen around here, but it says even more about God’s timing.)

Right in the dark, the truth hit me hard.

Three nails did the hardest work, rescuing us from our Eden-rooted past, giving us hope for our present, and eternally securing our futures.

And just think: our Risen Savior didn’t leave us as orphans. He filled us with His Holy Spirit, so that we could accomplish “even greater things.” (John 14:12)

In Christ, nothing is impossible. And as the Body of Christ, we are a part of Team Possible.

For every affliction, restriction, addiction or bit of friction in your life, there is one holy benediction: “It is finished.”

Through Christ and His church, the unimaginable becomes imaginable.

The impossible becomes possible.

God knows the unknown, and sees the unforeseen.

He holds all things together, and fastened Himself to a tree as the greatest exclamation mark on the greatest act known to humankind.

Wherever you’re going, He is already there.

“He took it away, nailing it to the cross.” ~ Colossians 2:14

Jennifer Dukes Lee used to cover crime, politics, and natural disasters as an award-winning news journalist in the Midwest. Now, Jennifer uses her reporting skills to chase after the biggest story in history: the redemptive story of Christ. She blogs at www.JenniferDukesLee.com. Soon, her words will make their way into her debut nonfiction Christian book, Love Idol: Letting Go of Your Need for Approval – and Seeing Yourself through God’s Eyes. She and her husband live on the Lee family farm in Iowa with their two daughters.