Choosing to See Chariots

What do you see when faced with problems? Victory or defeat? Do you see it as something that you are passing through or as something that will forever be at your side?  We all can quote the victory chant when the end can easily be seen but as the days turns to weeks and weeks turn to months and months to years, there is a tendency to loose the cheer and lose our ability to see change coming.

Reading today’s devotional from Streams in the Desert reminded me that it is my choice on how I view the test and trials that come my way. Will I see them as chariots transporting me from places of immaturity to maturity, weakness to strength, indifference to compassion, lameness to mobility? Or will I refuse to confront them and see them only as boulders crushing down upon me keeping me locked in, tied up and shut out?

Can I share with you the portion that caused my mind to go a churning this morning as I read?

Once our eyes are opened by God, we will see all the events of our lives as, whether great or small, joyful or sad, as a “chariot” for our souls. Everything that comes to us becomes a chariot the moment we treat it as such. On the other hand, even the smallest trial may become an object crushing everything in its path  into misery and despair if we all it.

The difference then becomes a choice we make. It all depends not on the events themselves but on how we view them. If we simply lie down, allowing them to roll over and crush us, they become an uncontrollable car of destruction. Yet if we climb into them, as riding into a car of victory, they become the chariots of God to triumphantly take us onward and upward. Hannah Whitall Smith

Now I know that life can throw some pretty difficult challenges our way and sometimes for the life of me I can’t see anything but doom and gloom. But it is at those times that I can pray, Lord open my eyes that I might see.