You Got This!

Maintaining Your Joy While Still Waiting on The Lord:

I was at an ALDI walking up to the door as I noticed two young boys. One was holding on to a huge bottle of Hawaiian Punch, and the other a gallon of milk. They looked like they were struggling a bit to hold up their grocery items. As I approached, I said to them, “Yall so strong. Look at you!” Those little kids perked up with smiles on their faces and held their items with vigor and pride as they waited on their mother, who was removing another baby from the cart and getting her quarter back. They felt like little men. That was the two boys, “You got this moment!”

That little story reminds me of how life can be sometimes waiting on the Lord. We can be struggling with our current circumstance—things like loneliness, tiredness, upset, or impatience. We’ve waited. We’ve endured. We’ve even endured much pain, and sometimes we need just a little jolt from someone walking across our path to remind us that we got this.

This actually happened to me this past week. I received a text from a close friend of mine who is currently pregnant. She was complaining about her headaches and how she felt as though she had a bowling ball in her stomach. Thus, she was not getting much sleep. I texted her back to see if there were any exercises that she could do to alleviate the pain. She shared there was, but she had to stop doing them due to the headaches.

She described a time when having a baby did not seem like such a strenuous deal to her when we were back in college together. She said it could be that now that she has not been around others much and isn’t as busy as she was in college; that the isolation is causing her to focus more on the pain.

I responded with a wow! I shared how I’d recently felt isolated and it was causing me to begin to go through again. I shared with her that she was not the only one, but that there were others of my bros and sis’ in Christ who I’ve talked with that were struggling with isolation and pain. I continued to encourage her sharing that at least she knows that at the end of her pain she will have joy.
“At the End of This Pain, You Will Have Joy.”
I continued to share the above quote as I encouraged her and thought about how her story would end; I was too encouraged to know that I was not alone and that I’d have joy at the end of my waiting on the Lord and enduring painful isolation or feelings of loneliness at times.
“A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come, but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. – John 16:21”

“There is an end time set to your pain.”
My friend continued to flip how she felt from complaining and focusing on her pain and discomfort to joy. She shared saying, “You know I do feel joy when the baby kicks.” By the end of the conversation, we both were encouraged and feeling like we could handle what life had been throwing our way.

Isn’t that ironic that out of the blue, my friend would text me on a day where I was feeling down, and all of a sudden, we both were encouraged? That was my “You got this!” moment. All it took was a little shift of encouragement to change my thinking from focusing on the pain and loneliness to the fact that God is preparing me to give birth to something in my life that will bring me joy. What are some of the ways God has used others to encourage you during your moments of feeling down and waiting on the Lord?

You got this! You can go on. You can make it until the end. You will see the promises of God come to pass. You got this!