Sunday 2 August 2015

The Fog


Have you ever found yourself wandering around in fog for such a long time that you end up forgetting what life was like before the fog? And then finally you emerge after days, weeks or even months and wonder why you didn’t make more of an effort to find your way out of the fog before…like perhaps when you first entered it! Suddenly everything is back in focus and things are crystal clear. You feel a sense of freedom and great relief….

The enemy often seems to work like this but the fog appears so gradually that we don’t notice it at first. Things do get harder but we attribute it to the trials of life and concentrate on navigating through the fog rather than trying to find the escape route. We pray that God will help us to endure rather than considering that God may not want us to remain in the circumstances. We think the “spiritual” thing to do is to persevere. We don’t consider what will happen if the fog begins to overwhelm us and we start to lose track of ourselves in the midst of it.  When this happens we foolishly believe that we have come so far already and persevered for so long that any attempt to exit now would make the journey so far a waste. We forget that we are learning all of the time and that God has a purpose in everything we experience, even seemingly meaningless times of floundering in fog.

When emerging from the fog we have two choices. We can either waste more time regretting the experience/wishing we had done things differently or exited before or we can PRESS ON, re-join the Christian race and continue pursuing the things we had on our hearts before we encountered the fog. Re-joining the race will often mean leaving others behind and it can be a lonely path. But it is the ONLY option for the Christian who has his heart set on the ultimate goal; eternity with Christ in heaven.

Consider the words of Spurgeon as an encouragement to leave the fog behind and to reach out to those who are not just temporarily incapacitated (by fog) but who are permanently blind and living in darkness without hope in this life

“Even if I were utterly selfish, and had no care for anything but my own happiness, I would choose, if I might, under God, to be a soul winner, for never did I know perfect, overflowing, unutterable happiness of the purest and most ennobling order, till I first heard of one who had sought and found a Saviour through my means.”