Back in 2021, I was hiking up a mountain with a group of English students and friends. It was a steep and seemingly endless climb of hand-placed stone steps leading ever upwards. The sun hung low in the sky as my friends made plans to race to the top before sunset, and I was in no way prepared to go at the pace required to reach the top by the time my friends had hoped I could.
I began telling them that they should go on ahead without me and that I would eventually catch up. One of them urged me, “Come on! You can do it! How can you already be so tired?”
I said no words in reply. My red face and heavy breaths did all the talking.
It was then that my friend chuckled as he said, “I mean, we haven’t even reached the challenging part yet.”
I’m heaving. I’m sweating, and my heart feels like it is about to burst. All of this, and I haven’t even reached the hard part yet.
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Today I’m in the process of learning French, the national language of the country where I will be serving as a Bible translator, and every time I think about all that lies ahead of me, I feel like I felt on that steep mountainside.
After all, moving here wasn’t supposed to be this difficult. Learning French wasn’t supposed to feel so impossible. Doing classes online was never meant to drain me so dry.
A terrible thought crosses my mind. “If I’m struggling now, while I’m just in language school, how can I hope to make it past what happens next?”
At times like this, when I can feel my heart filling with uncertainty and fear, I need to be reminded whom I serve. My favorite Scripture for this is God’s description of Himself in Job 38, offered in answer to Job’s doubts.
If I’m struggling now, while I’m just in language school, how can I hope to make it past what happens next?
I serve the God who laid the foundations of the earth. The Creator who formed the features of its surface like clay in His hand. The One who dresses the sky in the clouds during the day and the black darkness of the night.
To think that I dare speak of “challenge” to a God like that?
Yet I do, and He listens and He comforts me. I praise Him, and I will trust that He has guided me thus far, in the firm belief that He will continue taking me further than I ever imagined I
