by an Alliance creative-access worker
Never have I come to the close of a year and celebrated its passing as if I had just successfully put distance between myself and a pursuing enemy. The year 2017, however, was exceptional. Throughout the year, our team was buffeted with a series of security threats. The last six months were especially difficult, even causing us to leave the country briefly. The precautions we put into place restricted our normal freedoms and ate up energy we would have rather invested in other ministries.
As I celebrated the year’s passing, with its mix of sadness and hardship but also God’s goodness and grace throughout, I began to reflect on 2018. I realized that this year, I’m starting off with a posture I can’t fully explain—something like overwhelmed but defiant or defeated but showing up anyway.
Feeling Inadequate
As I look at the needs around me this year, I realize I don’t have the resources to adequately meet them. As I hear about the opportunities for ministry, I’m brought up short by my lack of energy.
As I consider the gravity of our situation, I’m not at all sure that I have what it takes—the wisdom, experience, and courage—to carve a way through it.
I am, without a doubt, out-matched.
Our culture tends to look at such statements as a bad case of poor self-esteem. I’m all for positive thinking, but I’m deeply convinced that this is an inaccurate assessment.
And lately I’ve been thinking about how Jesus must have, at times, felt this way. In His humanity, He must have surely questioned God’s plan. Isn’t there another way?
Unarmed, He faced down the Roman army. Poor, He fed and healed the masses. A lone voice in the cacophony, He quietly traced out a new way of life.
I recently read a Walter Brueggemann quote that I think sums it up well: “The servant [Jesus], this nobody with no resources, breaks the cycles of death and hurt precisely by a life of vulnerability, goes into the violence, and ends its tyranny.”
Christ Our Humble Model
Christ is our model for showing up—vulnerable, out-matched, but not shrinking back.
In humility, He allows the power of God to manifest through Him, not as “the winner” or “the conqueror” but in the unpredictable way of the Spirit.
Finding ourselves out-matched is the perfect place for faith to lead the way.
Where are you out-matched? Where are you tempted to shrink back?
“But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved” (Hebrews 10:39).
This year will undoubtedly contain its share of seemingly impossible challenges, but pressing forward in faith is the only way we will have the joy of seeing God’s saving power at work in our lives and our world. May we be found faithful.