This past Sunday, I shared a message entitled "There is Always a Way Forward". The theme of the message was, well, "there is always a way forward with Jesus", no matter what you may have experienced in life. Moving forward carries with it the idea of momentum (See Newton's Law of Inertia). I listed a few reasons why we experience difficulty in feeling as though we are moving forward, including "humanity's worship of the desires of the flesh", "humanity's worship of failure" and "Satan wants us to quit".
I did not include what I like to call "the grind". And I'm not talking about coffee beans.
I have been, at one time or another, a gamer. Not with supposed "games of skill and chance". That would make me a gambler; and I am much like my father who once told me "I couldn't play penny poker, because I was afraid to lose the penny." No I mean video games. Specifically RPGs (role playing games) and on occasion MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games). In these games there is the concepts of "levels" and "grinding". As you progress through the games, the enemies or tasks become more difficult and require higher levels of health or strength or various other attributes to overcome them. When you have completed all the tasks you're capable of completing at your current level, you start grinding. Grinding meaning here that you fight and defeat enemies at our below your current level for small amounts of XP (experience points) to try to advance to higher levels, so you can continue forward. This is a tedious, boring process. You spend hours (and sometimes days) performing seemingly meaningless repetitive tasks. A lot of people quit playing the games before they get into the higher levels because of the constant grinding.
Have you felt (or do you currently feel) as though YOUR LIFE is a grind?
Does it feel like you're doing the same mundane tasks over and over every day? Does it feel like this constant tedium is all you have? Do you feel like you aren't getting anywhere?
A lot of us feel or have felt this way. A lot of us have checked out before getting to the higher levels. Maybe you haven't given up completely, but you've given up on life being better or even different. You go through the motions emotionlessly, blindly, just because you don't know what else to do. I'm going to try to offer you some hope.
When we sharpen knives, we drag the blade through or across rough stone. We grind it to make it better. I have on many occasions taken a worn down lawnmower blade and given it sharpness again while holding it against a spinning rock on a bench grinder. I've shined up rusty metal against a spinning metal wheel. When a blade is formed, metal is heated, beaten, cooled, until it is formed in the way the metal worker wants it.
Proverbs 27:17 says "iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another". Metal grinds against metal.
Sometimes life is a grind. Sometimes it just has to be. The grind prepares us for something greater, if we don't get bogged down and think the grind is all there is.
God has a plan for you to move forward. You aren't meant to be stagnant. You aren't meant to grind forever. Unfortunately, we can't look at an xp bar or chart and see how far we have to go until the next level. We must hold fast to Jesus when we are in the middle of the grind. He is moving us up to a higher level where he is.