“Ask and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” (Matthew 7:7, NASB)
At age 20, Jordan Spieth won his first PGA Tour title. At age 21, he won the Masters and U.S. Open, and two years later, he won the Open Championship. Success looked like it came so easy for him for a period of time.
At the beginning of February, this former world number one and three-time major champion was ranked 92nd in the Official World Golf Rankings and struggling to make cuts on tour. Was he going to be another Ian Baker-Finch or David Duval, whose games fell apart after reaching extraordinary heights?
Not so fast! Spieth suddenly recorded three top-fives in his next four starts and appears to be knocking on the door for his first victory since 2017.
I might be more impressed with this recent surge in good play than I was with him six years ago when he was on top of the world, because he never gave up. He hung in there with his same coach and caddie and just kept grinding away, believing it would get better. He has handled himself with class all along the way, and it is hard not to pull for him to win again.
Have you ever felt like giving up? Do you ever feel like no matter what you do or try, things just don’t get better? I find that the faith journey looks a lot like a professional golf career. There are ups and downs, highs and lows, mountaintop experiences and valleys of despair.
Maybe God cares more about who you are becoming than making life easier or better.In the Scriptures, there are not many instances of smooth sailing, if any. Instead, we find God’s people desperate for him to show up and intervene. We love to tell the miraculous stories, but what about the other times? You know, the times of despair where we are pleading for God to help and all we hear are crickets chirping. We might even get angry with him, make compromises in our ethics, or just flat out lose faith in his love for us. We ask, “Where are you, God?”
In these moments we can feel lost, alone, and abandoned. You may feel that way now, and the last thing you want is for some writer who doesn’t know your situation to throw another Bible verse at you. So I won’t.
I will just go ahead and answer your question now with the same thing you will realize for yourself down the road. “Where is God?” in hindsight will be answered with “There was God!”
You may feel like you have been knocking on the door for way too long, thinking, If God really cared, he would have already fixed this by now. But what if the work he is up to right now is in you rather than for you? Maybe he cares more about who you are becoming than making life easier or better.
He knows you will get through this and that you will be stronger for it, “knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance” (James 1:3). However, if you find yourself in a good season of life, then I hope you will look for someone you can walk alongside and help carry their burdens. Encourage them by being the hands and feet of God, so that when this trial is over, they will remember how God showed up and answered the door in the form of you.
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Josh Nelson
March 16, 2021
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.
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