Out Our Way: Riding with Gideon - Judges 6:11-16

Out our way, as in most places, folks go through hard times and have to endure.

I recall, when I was first learning to ride, I had a horse go “haywire” on me, spooked by a dog. He started to spin and kick and then took off full tilt heading right for the fence. I was an inexperienced rider on a spooked horse that paid no attention to my hauling on the reins — nobody had yet taught me to circle a spooked horse to calm them down — and I was in sheer panic myself. I was sure I was going to get tossed or worse. But the gal who owned the ranch and the horses just rode beside me saying “You can do it” and I hung on. Sure enough, the horse eventually calmed down and I got through it. As frightened as I was, in time I realized that such moments are part of the learning curve. Nobody gets tossed at the pony rides at the state fair, but I have yet to meet anyone who has actually become a good rider who didn’t get “launched” and end up eating dirt a few times along the way.

I am reading C.S. Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters,” and part of the wisdom imparted in this humorous and yet extremely deep spiritual message is the realization that no one grows as a disciple without some hard knocks along the way. It is a necessary part of learning to become the woman or man God created you to be. For the trail God calls us to ride is not flat, nor is it all mountain top experiences. In fact, Lewis notes, if one looks closely at the lives of the spiritual giants we admire, one finds they did most of their most important growth, not from the mountain top experiences, but from their time slogging through the muck deep in the gullies.

One reads the lives of Moses, Joshua, the prophets, the Apostles etc, and one sees all faced hard times as part of the faith journey. Yet one also sees that the dark times were necessary to the faith journey and that they did not last. We also see that in most cases these were also periods of greatest growth. And we also see that in these times when God seemed distant, He was still there. Like a parent teaching a child to walk, there were times when God let go of our hand so that we could grow and develop the ability to walk . God created us as individuals — not as robots. 

Gideon was terrified of God’s command to take on the enemy because that was way beyond his abilities. But he learned in doing it, that it was not above God’s. If the Lord is with us, who can stand against us? Sometimes that’s hard to accept, especially when we are in the depths. But as we grow in our experience with God, we begin to trust Him. Maybe the hard times — the “thorns in the flesh” — are necessary .

Be blessed and be a blessing

Brother John

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The Rev. John Bruington is the retired pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Havre. He now lives in Colorado, but continues to write “Out Our Way.” He can be reached for comment or dialogue at [email protected].