A Bad Fall

When I was about twelve, I had a bad fall incident. It was a Minnesota winter- one of THOSE winters! I was running late for the school bus, so late that I built up enough speed to not only fall on the ice, but SLIDE partly under the bus as well! Beautiful! And oh, so safe and dignifying! Because there’s nothing preteen girls love more than a preteen and teen audience witnessing your moment of impact with nature’s ice rink!

Anyhoo, my point is this: embarrassing falls happen. They can be the literal fall of, for instance, missing a step or curb or slipping on a patch of ice. Or they can be spiritual or emotional falls, in which something horrible happened that devastated you, like a severed relationship, a communication mishap, or feeling isolated and estranged because of circumstances that were out of your control.

And then, there’s the fall of “relapse.” Nothing can make a person feel more like a worthless failure than relapse. You feel defeated, hopeless, weak, a failure. You somehow reason that you’re the one lone person in the world who failed and can’t sustain recovery. “Everyone else” has got it down; if you were a “better person,” you scream to yourself, you could get it too.

But we all fall:

“For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;”

Romans 3:23

The fact is, yes, it was sooooooooooooooooooooooooo embarrassing when I fell at 12…and 13… and 19… and 23… and 27…and, well, you get the picture… I’ve slid under a lot of buses in my time, had sooooooo many failures, with plenty of onlookers watching.

But life went on; the moment- hellish, embarrassing , defeating- PASSED!

Again, 2 Corinthians 4:18:

“While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen [are] temporal; but the things which are not seen [are] eternal.”

I fell at twelve, was embarrassed, struggled to get up, got up, got on the bus, etc.

And with each fall, each year, whether I felt it was happening or not, I still got up because God was helping me.

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”

Psalms 46:1

God’s helping you too. So, what’s your latest fall? Are you struggling to get up?

Still feel like a worm? Well, how ‘bout this?

“For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again...”

Proverbs 24:16

God’s not mad at you; He’s helping you to get up from your fallen place.

Don’t stay where you fell; that is not your destiny! Your future is your destiny!