Desperation can make you act and think irrationally. Then it’s easy to make a bad decision that can actually hinder God from solving your problem as quickly as He desires. BECAUSE… He has to clean up your mess first!
Several years ago, I had a dream.
I found a bag of my favorite kind of candy in the back of my cabinet. It was such a pleasant surprise to find this nice treat.
I opened the bag and dug in without looking at the contents. After eating a couple of bites, I realized the candy didn’t taste good. I looked in the bag and saw all sorts of cob webs with several spiders running around.
Then a huge cockroach popped its head out of the bag and stared at me. It was as if it were flaunting the fact that I had eaten some of the gross stuff that was in the bag.
Now I was nauseated and certainly wasn’t hungry any longer. Earlier in the dream, I remembered feeling something run up my arm. But I hadn’t bothered to see what it was because I was enjoying my treat.
Now I knew that the something I felt on my arm had probably been a cockroach. I ran to the mirror to see if it was still crawling on me.
At that point I woke suddenly and was extremely thankful to find that this was just a dream.
I started to think about how I had done similar things in the past. It is easy to plunge headlong into something that looks good without asking for or waiting on the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Everything that looks good isn’t always the best for you. The Holy Spirit knows exactly what you need at exactly the right time to help you make an important decision.
A great word picture of this is something that actually happened to me in the early 1980s.
My husband had been laid off work during a really bad recession. We went through a rough time financially. And he took whatever work he could find to support our family.
We had two children under 3, so my work options were limited. And because of the recession, it was hard to find any kind of job. It was a terrible time to get laid off.
I will never forget looking at the jobs section in the back of the newspaper. Where there had been several columns of jobs previously, now there were hardly any.
I was desperate to find a job that could help our dire situation. And my desperation grew day by day.
I came across an ad in a paper about stuffing envelopes from home. The person who wrote it was good at marketing. I could just imagine all the hundreds of dollars I would make as I contributed to our family finances.
And even better, I could work from home.
The article was vague about what would actually be in the envelopes you would stuff, but by then I was hooked. My husband tried to tell me it was a scam, but did I believe him? NO.
Desperation can make you act and think irrationally, and it’s easy to make a bad decision. You try to justify what you are doing as something that will make the horrible situation better.
I sent off for information and got another well written sales pitch about the hundreds I could make each month. By this time I was so desperate that I mailed them the $13 they were asking for, which was almost all the money I had.
There was no email and filling out a form online with instant results, so I had to wait several excruciating days for my envelopes to come through the mail.
I finally received a letter from them. And guess what? It had no envelopes, but only tips about how to make money stuffing envelopes. I later found out that all they had to do was send you something back that they deemed had the same value as the money you had sent them.
There was no envelope to stuff to make even $1 of my money back. All $13 was gone, which was a lot to me at the time.
I still remember how nauseated I felt when I opened the envelope and knew I had fallen for a scam. I felt even worse knowing that I had sent them my husband’s hard earned money. He didn’t get too mad at me because I guess he knew that I was trying to help in whatever way I could.
If I had prayed intently about the envelope situation, I know that God would have somehow shown me it was a scam. And I would not have found myself wallowing in an extreme desperation that got worse each day.
He probably would have answered my prayer in a different way than I could have imagined. But His answer would have been much better than the one I got from the “envelope stuffing company.”
When you concentrate on God and what He desires, desperation will never have a chance to gain a foothold.
You can walk in God’s strength, ability, and power as He carries out His work through you. Nothing in this world can make you feel as great as that.
