Strength for Today

We sang “Great is Thy Faithfulness” in Chapel today. And like never before, I’ve needed to sing the line “Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow” in hopes that I will actually come to believe it.

On the outside my body often looks so healthy.

But on the inside, my body still deals with neuropathy, and pain, and what feels like insurmountable weakness and fatigue. “How am I going to make it through the semester?” I wonder. In fact, “How am I going to make it though today?”

Just now I was thinking about the Israelites in the wilderness, and how God offered them fresh manna each day. They needed to trust that God would provide new food each day. If they tried storing the manna their attempts backfired, and the manna turned rotten and needed to be thrown out. Oh how badly I want to store up manna. I want to sleep on piles of it. I want to swim in a pool of it. I want to have an entire storehouse full of fresh, delicious manna that I can sit in the midst of, and maybe, finally, feel safe.

This season, particularly the last couple of days, have taught me how badly I need to ask God for strength for today. I cannot think about whether or not I will survive the semester, the week, or even tomorrow. I need strength for today.

I’m hoping at some point I will learn to trust the Lord, to rest in Him enough that this will no longer feel like a terrifying chore. That I will no longer wake up wondering if I’m going go actually survive until bedtime and beyond. Somewhere this week, perhaps in one of my classes, I heard someone refer to faith as dangling from a spider’s web. And I guess that’s how I feel…as though I am suspended, and I need to trust that that web is going to hold.

And it always does. ALWAYS. And yet each morning I wake up and worry that today will be the day it breaks. I worry that today will be the day that I do not survive. Actually, I start worrying as I’m lying in bed the night before.

I long to wake up and see this business of strength for today as not a desperate prayer that I’m worried might not be answered, but…oh I don’t know… perhaps see strength for today as though I’m crawling into the arms of a Father that I can depend on. Or…a journey I am excited to take…or something that is reliable and not scary.

Lord, I ask for strength for today, hope for tomorrow, and faith that You will provide both of these things.  

Amen.