Stuck in a Snowbank

 

Let him who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the Lord and rely on his God.

—Isaiah 50:10

As a child, I can remember a few times getting “stuck” in the snow. Sometimes the snow banks towered above the cars on the road. So, it was no wonder that the occupants of a stuck vehicle would need help from a tractor or truck to pull them out.

There have been times in my adult life when I’ve felt like my life has been driven into a snow bank. At such times it seemed as if I had no way forward and no way back, and that I had no ability to even see out of the windows! In those times, I have had no choice but to call on the Lord to help me out of the perplexing circumstances surrounding me and making me feel stuck.

If you’ve ever waited for a tow truck to come to your rescue, you know that you often wait for what seems like a very long time. In the same way, God sometimes makes us wait for His coming to rescue us, too.

God has told us in Hebrews 13:5:

“Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

Though we cannot see where we are, or where we are going, we can know He will be there beside us and, when we need His help, He will rescue us. No matter how dark this winter experience of our lives may seem, eventually God will bring us the newness of spring.

We don’t like to put our trust into whatever we cannot see, touch, feel, hear, or taste. But, if we rely totally on our five senses to help us trust God, we are not exercising faith.

Remember the story recorded about the Disciple Thomas, whose absence from the meeting where the risen Lord appeared prompted him to say, as recorded in John 20:25:

“Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe it [the resurrection].”

The following week, Thomas joined the other Disciples when Jesus appeared again. Jesus had Thomas use his senses of sight and touch to verify the nail holes and scars in Jesus’s side. Then, Jesus said to Thomas, as recorded in John 20:29:

“Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

All of us need more faith. An ever-deepening of our faith becomes a hallmark of our Christian formation. When we find ourselves buried in some “snow drift” of life with no way out—and when we have no sense of where we are or where we are headed—we must remember to pray the words spoken by the father of the boy possessed by an impure spirit, found in Mark 9:24:

“Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”