Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. 4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
James 1:2-4
Every December, Rachael and I choose a single word and a single verse to serve as theme for the year. Past years have seen us hold to Hope, focus on being Intentional, and work to Dispel the darkness. As we unpacked lights and decorations for the birth of Christ, we turned our attention to the New Year and new decade that was just around the corner. We like to pick a word, make a image, print it out as a reminder for ourselves and our kids of what God is asking and challenging us to. This year’s word: PERSEVERANCE.
More than once during the COVID-19 crisis Rachael and I have felt the need to formally apologize to the entire world for bringing you into the lesson God is trying to teach us about this idea of persevering. So if there is blame to place, you can look our way.
2020 opened in an unexpected and exciting way. We sang, we danced, we worship at the Passion Conference as Hillsong United rang in the New Year. Like most of you, the new start sparked a great hope and expectation of what was to come. Rachael and I had been blessed to be in the very same room as people in the faith community that we admired and desired to follow in how they lived out their specific calling. With high hopes of what God had done in the waking moments of 2020, we held this word in tension: perseverance.
Little did we know in just two short months the world would come to a screeching halt. With that screaming stop came hopes and dreams. With it came a complete change in direction. Like most of you, our kids have existed in walls of our house, completing assignments and social distancing. Normal life of dinner out, TJ Maxx runs, and Target stops ceased. More than those peripheral activities, what seemed to stop was progress toward a direction we felt God had specifically called us to go in. Our natural emotions looked at the circumstance of the situation and in many ways mourned what looked like loss. Then that word, that seemingly prophetic verb stood there framed on the shelf staring me back in the face: perseverance.
James, the brother of Jesus, penned these words by the guidance of the Holy Spirit:
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. 4 Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
James 1:2-4
Where mourning and misery entered, the Spirit of God says count it, consider it, it definitely is JOY when you face trials. When that testing comes of your faith, of your hope, of your belief in the unseen things, it produces, you guessed it PERSEVERANCE. The very word where we started.
I do not know the outcomes. I cannot predict the future. Yet, I can find rest in this, I know what God has asked our house to do – persevere. I can trust the one who holds the world. I can lean into the own who already has every day of my life written in his book. I can believe the one who said “in this world you will have trouble, but have courage, I have overcome the world.” I can persevere. I can walk through. I can keep going.
We have a promise. We have a God given vision for something that we know God will bring to pass. What I have seen over and over in scripture is when God’s people look like they have lost is the very moment God does the miraculous. So instead of sitting in the sadness, we sit in the expectation that the all powerful God is about to do something so incredible that even our imaginations could not contain it. We just have to persevere.
