I PLAYED A lot of basketball back in the day…

I sprained my ankles many times and I learned too late that the best way to handle all that black-and-blue is to fill a wastebasket with ice, and top it off with water.  Then, while the injury is fresh, put your wounded foot deep into that cold water and leave it there.

If you can last for one minute, it’s just crazy painful.  But if you can keep it in there for two minutes, the injury and its recovery time will be cut in half.  (The problem is that after two minutes the pain is so excruciating that you will be saying words your mother didn’t know you knew.)

If you can hang on for two and a half minutes, you can be playing basketball again by Thursday, but the pain of holding your foot in that arctic water will have you crying out for someone to bring you a sharp object.  Even with my worst injuries I seldom made it two and a half minutes.  

But here is the incredible thing a bout “remaining under the pain” of having your foot in that cold bucket.  If you can hang on for three minutes, you’ll be walking on it tomorrow.  The pain will be consuming those last thirty seconds, worse by far than the injury itself now.  But you will walk tomorrow.

It is just that way with trials.  You can come to the place where the circumstance itself is less painful than the commitment not to give up.  If staying put was easy, if submitting to what God allows and not giving up was simple…everyone would be doing it.  The fact is, many folks are going round and round with God about the very same things because they change the scenery or marriage or job or congregation rather than remaining under the trial and letting God change them.  James MacDonald, “Why Trials?”, When Life is Hard, 63, 64

“But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.”  James 1.4

Mike Benson