Over the weekend God taught me a valuable lesson…
After our game this weekend, I was really frustrated with myself because I was over-analyzing what felt like every decision I made in the game on Friday, in practice last week, and in every day life. I found myself criticizing every spoonful of ice cream I put in my mouth, every bad step I made when approaching defenders in the game, all the miss-trapped balls that went through my legs or ricochet off my stick, and other small insignificant decisions that felt insurmountable to me. I summed all of these decisions up to mean that I had failed..don’t worry, looking back after my lesson with God, I’ve come to realize that these thoughts are far from true. But, this is exactly where God picked me back up and reminded me of His goodness, endless love, and infinite grace by showing me He is greater than the difficulties that I face.
These thoughts were a result of me thinking that with God, my life is supposed to be perfect and everything is supposed to fall perfectly into place because that’s what happens when you follow God and know Jesus, right? Wrong. God did not promise us rainbows and butterflies here on earth, that’s in heaven. In John 16:33, Jesus tells his disciples, “In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world”.  And right before that verse Jesus says, “in Me you may have peace”.  Christine Caine explains difficulty as a bully in our lives. In her book Undaunted, she tells an inspiring tale of how her A21 campaign came to life after being told it was going to be nearly impossible. But she knew God was calling her to Greece to do the impossible and God moved hearts and paperwork and people to make it happen, revealing how much greater He is than difficulty. It just shows that even if you have faith the size of a mustard seed you can truly move mountains (Matthew 17:20).

Life on earth isn’t easy. But that’s why God sent Jesus, the purest of pure to die on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins so that we can have a relationship with Him and He can walk through life on earth with us and be our source of strength to get through the difficulty. Even Jesus didn’t have an easy life, but God helped him through it.

“He who is in you is greater than this world” – 1 John 4:4

Know that you are made perfect in weakness!

-Katie