He makes my feet like the feet of a deer, and sets me on my high places.  He teaches my hands to make war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze. —Psalm 18:33-34

This verse.  It’s come up so many times these past couple months.  Sometimes I question what God is doing through these days, when my feet feel more like those of a toddler than of a deer climbing mountain crags, when my arms are barely strong enough to lift in surrender, much less to endure battle.

Over and over, in the midst of my doubt that God is in this at all, He has brought me to this passage in Psalm 18.  The words stick in my mind and I can’t get around them.  When I fear that we are going to be forced down a path we don’t want to take, or stuck in circumstances that promise only difficulty and not enough, I am reminded that the whole point of trials, the only way to increase in faith and strength, is to be taken beyond our abilities…to know the pressing of a weight we haven’t yet borne, and to find that before we can be crushed, He gives an answer, and we come to know His strength in greater measure than at first.

I would think that a deer must surely stumble when first daring to walk the harder path, and a soldier must push himself to the limits of his strength – to the place where he finds himself faltering – in order to grow stronger, and so some trials only serve their purpose if we are brought to the end of ourselves and, in that place, learn more the faithfulness of our God who promises to be our everything.

I forget this truth easily, which is probably why God has been setting it constantly before me lately.  And it’s what I find myself clinging to, this hope that He is working His purposes through these days, to make us more fit for service in His kingdom, to enable us to proclaim His faithfulness with even more certainty, to have strength to stand through future storms.

Despite all of the unpleasantness of this season, I am thankful that God will do what’s necessary to draw us closer, and make us stronger, and help us see ever more clearly that He is always faithful and always good.