By Bindu Adai-Mathew

Challenge yourself to embrace both difficult and picture perfect days.  AbbyA

Embracing picture perfect days is easy, but are you, kidding me, AbbyA? Embrace difficult days, too? Surely you mean accept difficult days, right?  After all, who of us wants to embrace those dreary, overcast, “when is my life going to get better” days that we all have to endure? Have you not seen the economy or the job market? Embrace? Really?

Really. For AbbyA hasn’t just given us a challenge with those words. She has given us an invitation. She is inviting us to experience God at His greatest…when we are at our weakest. When He is our true sufficiency when we are at our most insufficient. When He is the only thing we can rely on, that is when we truly experience God.

I am convinced that the Children of Israel had the desert experience not as a punishment, but it was an invitation to have the most intimate experience with their maker. During their desert experience, God provided them with manna for food, but every time they tried to hoard it for the next day, it became filled with maggots. God was inviting them to experience His Sufficiency. He was trying to tell them to trust that He would provide them with their morning manna every day. Trust that he would continue doing what He promised.  He didn’t want them focused on the manna…He wanted them focused on Him.  Because He would take care of all their needs.

Yes, my friend…embrace your difficult days…It may be during those days, where like Children of Israel, you have the chance to be fed by His Manna by day and warmed by His Fire at night.  Let those difficult days be the days where God reveals His true power to you. Where you experience the “Peace that Passes All Understanding” despite your circumstances. Where you experience His Power over the most hardest of hearts. Where He opens up the impossible doors of your life like the Red Sea so you can walk through them. Those difficult, stormy days that you are hating and wishing would just pass may end up being the most defining days of your Christian walk. Because it is there, through the haze and fog of the storm, where you will see and experience the Presence of your Maker.