The Gray Day Challenge

The first of March was drawing near, and I could feel the rising joy in my soul that the anticipation of Spring always brings. Having spent most of the winter recuperating from a broken elbow and multiple surgeries to correct the damage, I was more ready than most to get back to work and get on with the life that my injury had so interrupted. But instead it was my line of thinking that was suddenly interrupted as I walked through the kitchen one morning and spied a bag left on the table at the end of a long evening. Across the front were the words “GRAY MATTERS. Did you know?”

The question stopped me short for some reason. I was intrigued enough to look up the website listed under the phrases that had grabbed my attention. Apparently they were merely a reference to the store's recycling efforts and had nothing to do with anything I was going through. Or so I thought.

Any of us who are going through a difficult period in our life experience, regardless of the season or time of the year, are ready to celebrate a time of new beginnings, fresh hope and warm and gentle breezes across our souls. We are quick to discard the current “winter” months as disturbing and distasteful...a time to hurry through. Yet a difficult journey is made bearable by the knowledge that God knows exactly where we're at, has our situation under control, and will be with us through all the days that lie ahead.

That's what we need to know, isn't it? That God sees ...that He hears our prayers... that He cares about what we're going through.

The devil would like us to think that God has abandoned us in our times of trouble, that He took flight to warmer climes like a supernatural snowbird and left us to wander through the cold of our current experience alone. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. And so, as if in rebuttal, God poses the question that I ran into this morning.

Did you know...that what matters to you, matters to God? That He promised to never leave us nor forsake us? While we would be quick to change our circumstances, God is more interested in changing the way we think about them, working with the gray matter between our ears in the hope of getting us to see our lives from His perspective. The only thing that really matters is God 's presence in all our days...be they sunny, or cloudy with trouble or pain. And often it is in the most difficult days of our lives that His nearness and love can be felt as never before.

In the physical world, it is in the cold and dark of the winter months that changes invisible to the naked eye are happening in seeds and bulbs underneath the ground that produce the flowers in the Spring which so delight us. And likewise it is in the difficult months of struggle and hardship that change occurs in our spiritual makeup, the evidence of which in subsequent seasons brings tremendous joy to the heart of God.

If our gray days matter to God, then they should matter to us as well. So don't discount them. Look for and learn the lessons they provide, and give thanks for the subsequent gifts that come into your life that you would likely not have experienced any other way.

“Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don't try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.”

(James 1:2-4 MSG)