Close your eyes and imagine your best day. Maybe it's the day you took your wedding vows and married your best friend, or held your child in your arms for the first time. Maybe the day that you reconnected with a loved one, or found hope after too many days, weeks, months or years of the struggling in the storms of life. Whatever that day is think about it for a moment. Got it? Okay.
How easy was it to thank God that day?
Pretty easy, right? There's so much joy in your heart that you could just sing His praises from the rooftops.
Now I'm going to ask you to do something much harder. Close your eyes and think for just a moment about your worst day ever.
How easy was it to thank God that day?
At least for me it was much, much harder.
I remember my worst day ever very clearly. It started with a phone call that woke me up. I went back to sleep hoping that I would wake up to a different reality. It didn't happen. I won't go into the details today but that day started me on a downward spiral and one of the hardest times in my spiritual life.
It's really easy to praise God when things are good. It's when things are bad that it's so much harder. But it's during those hard times when your grasping to understand, when your begging God to help you, when your screaming in anger or crying in pain that He picks you up and begins putting the pieces of your shattered heart back together. Often it takes years before you can look back and see how He was using the heartbreak and pain to teach you something, to grow you in your spiritual life and bring about amazing blessings that you never expected.
There's a reason that people say that we grow more in our spiritual lows then our highs. So how do we measure spiritual growth?
My worst day started me on a dark road. I stopped speaking to God for a long time and struggled to try to understand how a loving God could allow such horrible things to happen. I think we've all been there. But when I came back to Christ I found that even though I'd walked away He used that time to teach me valuable lessons and bring me unexpected blessings.
Every time I go through something really difficult I find that if I cling to God I grow in my spiritual life by leaps and bounds. If I walk away from the Lord then He can and will still redeem me but it's a much harder road to walk.
The point is that when we're trying to measure our spiritual growth the good days, when we feel like we're incredibly close to God are a great blessing but they're not the best way to see how we're doing in our walk with Christ. It's those hard days, the times when we can barely get out of bed and how we react to those times that we find out how much faith we really have.
The good news is that even when we fall short the Lord is right there beside us, offering a hand up and teaching us lessons that will help us through the next storm in life.
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