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Day 5 - Do Not Worry: Training For the Challenges of Life

ASK: Ask God to join you today for this time to understand yourself and your motives for being in relationship with others. 

READ: Philippians 4:6-7, Matthew 6:25-34

DEVOTIONAL: What’s your default? Are you an optimist, a pessimist? Is the cup half-full or half-empty? Are you a doer or a watcher? How do you look at and participate in life? 

There are lots of challenges in our life. Some of them come at us. Others we may have created ourselves and need to work through. We can choose to view these challenges in a positive way or a negative way. It’s up to us. Chuck Swindoll, the pastor and author, is quoted as saying, "words can never adequately convey the incredible impact of our attitudes toward life. The longer I live the more convinced I become that life is 10 percent what happens to us and 90 percent how we respond to it." How do we train for handling what life throws at us?

I had a friend who kept saying he really wanted to learn and memorize Bible verses more. But he was a VERY busy guy, so he never made the time to read or study the Bible at all. When I would ask him how he was doing with his goal, he’d tell me how busy he was and then say something like “I just need to pray harder.” I pulled him aside and told him it didn’t matter how hard he prayed if he wasn’t going to crack open his Bible. The verses weren’t just magically going to come into his head. Now don’t get me wrong. I do believe that God works miracles and can give you verses as you need them, but we still need to do our part. If you live like you need a miracle every day, maybe you should change the way you live. I related to him that this was kinda like running a marathon. No matter how hard you might want to do it, if you don’t train in some way every single day to be able to run that far, there’s no way you’re going to be able to do it when race day comes. 

For many, many years, I was invited to serve as a media trainer for SWAT teams as they would go through their annual SWAT Operators Immersion School, refreshing their tactical skills and learning new methods for unraveling tough situations. It was incredible to see them training over and over again until handling a crisis became second nature, almost instinct instead of a reaction. When SWAT was dispatched, there was no need to panic because they knew they could do what they had been trained to do to protect and serve by de-escalating the situation appropriately.  

You’ve heard the phrase, “practice makes perfect.” I don’t know about the perfection thing, but I do know that practicing over and over makes it easier to be able to do what you want to do instead of being blown by the wind, freezing up or panicking in a tough situation. William Arthur Ward, an inspirational writer, said “Do more than believe; practice.” We can do more than believe in our faith in Jesus. We can practice through our actions, words and deeds. We can do more for living as God would have us live by practicing that way of living. 

WRITE: God has a plan for your life. Write down your thoughts about “Why me?” Write down what you believe you were made for. What do you love to do? What more can you do for living your life as God has planned for you? 

MEDITATE: Pray for God to reveal to you the areas in your life that could be lived in a different way as to cause you less stress, and ultimately being an example of God being at work in your life.