If you work with a computer as your main tool, as I do, the one thing you dread is to flip it open and see the Blue Screen of Death. This means that you’re computer won’t work for you and likely has to be reformated or replaced. Unless you know a magical friend who can do miracles on laptops. Well, sometimes life hands us Blue Screens, moments and seasons where nothing or nobody seems to be working for us. I devoted chapter four of iFaith to this idea. Here is an excerpt:
Life seemed way too big for my abilities. God had placed me in unique positions of influence, authority, and responsibility and so the inevitable doubts circulated in my head. I can’t do this. I’ll find a way to mess this up. I’m not like those other guys.
During this time God brought me a refreshing resource. A friend suggested Dr. Henry Blackaby’s remarkable classic, Experiencing God Day by Day. So I began the year journaling through this book as part of my daily time with God.
The May 4 entry was a wonderful balm for my rising unbelief. Dr. Blackaby writes, “God uses our activities and circumstances to bring us to Himself. When He gives us a God-sized assignment, its sheer impossibility brings us back to Him for His enabling.”
This was a lightbulb moment for me. It suddenly occurred to me that God purposely gave me assignments way bigger than my human capacity to perform them. Why? So I’d come to grips with my own frailty and lean in on the power of God.
Now, a few key quotes from that chapter:
- God sends His called-out children on a collision course with the impossible.
- In other words, the faith that pleases God is not necessarily a set of beliefs, though what you believe does matter. Nor is faith about what you do or how hard you do it.
- The Bible simply says faith is believing in something or, rather, Someone you can’t see. It is entrusting the totality of your life to an unseen power. In this case, Jesus Christ.
- God does His greatest work on the margins of comfort, when the impossibility of our calling collides with the reality of our human frailty.
- We see through the lens of the daily microscope, all those panicky choices made in unbelief, the sin patterns, and the reactions made in the flesh.
- But God looks beneath the layers of our humanity and looks for the mustard seed, the faith, and finds something He can grow to glorify Him.
Have you ever experienced a blue screen moment in your life?