I would hazard a guess, based on my personal experience, age and general listening plus paying attention, that many people get stuck along the way in life. Something happened or didn’t happen. They have endured some affliction. Some gotcha got them or even they may have enjoyed way too much of a good thing for way too long… Suffice it to say, they have become stuck, as in not moving forward, aka stopped in their tracks, fast forward, stagnating away in a perpetual pool of nothing happens. What sticks it to you to make you stuck and how can you escape it?
All of life is on the move. Only dead things stay still. You can either egress or digress. You flourish or you wither. You continue to grow or you begin to die. No matter how you wrap it, life was designed to involve forward action. People, in general, are at their best as long as they are moving towards something. You don’t have to be in a full sprint and at times you are allowed to pause, but when you stop altogether, that’s where the trouble starts. People stop moving for a variety of different reasons. Some find themselves embroiled in a problem for which there appears to be no solution. Others have long given up on their dreams or accepted the falsity that they had no dreams. Some think they are too old, too fat, too dumb, too lazy or too anything that convinces them it’s okay to surrender. For others it may be a mistake they made 40 years ago or even last month. Some are just plain old worn out by life. Regardless of the shape or form it comes in, ceasing from forward movement is always not true!
Full speed living means that you take on an issue as soon as it appears. Like children do so beautifully, you create a large fuss about your needs not being met then not let it go until something happens. Children are persistent. Adults are complacent. Children are honest. Adults lie to themselves to make things okay. Children ask for help right away. Adults ask for help just after all hell has broken loose. The quickest and easiest way to solve a problem is right when it occurs. You take it on and deal with it right now! Letting things go, a national epidemic, allows our difficulties and troubles to become entrenched. Once entrenched, like allowing yourself to weigh too much, is that much harder from which to escape. And, your habits of letting it go must be confronted with that much more resolve, a habit you have not been practicing. Then, no wonder you find yourself stuck! People aren’t talked out of their dreams overnight. They are talked out of them over days and months and years. You can’t become too old or too fat or too lazy unless you have let something go for too long! You are worn out not by life, but by your refusal to fight back. Even mistakes, no matter how egregious, represent a moment in time; one you can never get back.
Each precious day of your life you are in a contest. Your mind is the arena. You can battle and strive or you can give in and retreat, but no matter what you do, you are in a fight. Wishing away the fight won’t end the fight. Ignoring the fight just leads to eventual defeat because you are still getting hit. Numbing yourself to the fight is more of the same. You have to learn to fight back! You have to learn what exactly is going on. If you don’t and many, many don’t, then you lose. You get stuck then whittled away in a shitty existence always wishing you would have and should have etc. And worse, all that crap that’s been threatening you a lifetime starts settling in on you. Can’t you see it? You stopped moving forward. You quit fighting for yourself. You gave in…
Your life is not over, no matter what has happened or where you find yourself! You may have stopped moving for awhile, but if you are reading this, it aint over yet! You still have hope. You can change once you finally learn what has been perpetually kicking your butt! But, learn you must. You aren’t alone in your quest. In fact, you are just like all the rest of us. You are in the contest because all people are in the contest. You may not have been competing very well, but you can learn to compete. You can learn what it means to fight spiritually with spiritual enablements and quit relying on your intelligence, your brain, your extreme rationality. You can see because God wants you to see. All you need is a little humility and a little willingness to ask for help. Or you can sit there, defeated, pretending to be okay, and wait for the end. “Why sit we here until we die?”
The simplest way out of your dilemma is to begin moving forward again. Move forward! Stop looking around you bewildered, confused, distressed and decide to make a move. Take some action. Come to my Bible fellowship. Pray about it and then listen carefully. Read your Bible. Talk to a friend. Do something. Don’t just sit there mentally, do something. You will quickly learn that once you make a move, God makes a move. Once you act, God acts. God won’t make you move (trust me), but He will honor your believing efforts. There is an answer. There are always answers.
No matter how entrenched you’ve become in that giant bowl of spaghetti, know this, once long ago there was just one piece of pasta, from which you could easily escape. You just need to start grabbing at the strands, one at a time until they’re all gone. With God’s help you can do it. You can move ahead. You can the life you have imagined!
Just some good thoughts…