If You’re Going Through Hell, Keep Going
“For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised” (Hebrews 10:36).
I have had a really, really tough few years of receiving cancer treatments. Last month I was ready to give up. There have been several moments like this in my journey with cancer.
What did I do?
I’ll return to this in a moment. For now, let me encourage you with a short story that was sent to me by a warrior woman of great faith, Pastor Dorothy Langstaff. She’s been an inspiration to me for over 2 decades.
She sent me this in the midst of my cancer battle, so I am passing it on to you, along with some closing comments.
“In 1952 young Florence Chadwick stepped into the Pacific, just off Catalina Island, determined to swim to the mainland of California. She’d already been the first woman to swim the English Channel—both ways.
The weather was foggy and chilly; she could hardly see the boats accompanying her. Still, she swam for 15 hours.
When she begged to be taken out of the water, her mother, who was in a boat alongside, told her she was close and that she could make it.
Finally, physically and emotionally exhausted, she stopped swimming and was pulled out. It wasn’t until she was on the boat that she discovered that the shore was less than half a mile away.
At a news conference the next day she said, “All I could see was the fog…I think if I could have seen the shore I would have made it.”
What about you? Are you going through a fog right now? Keep going.
Are you going through misunderstandings, financial hardships, or relational issues? Keep going.
So last month I had another PET-CT Scan which looked clean, and I was expecting to be told I could stop the immunotherapy Treatments with their side-effects. Upon closer inspection, my Oncologist saw what he thought could be a remaining tumor, and recommended I stay on the Treatment.
I decided to endure.
Sometimes you are called to walk a journey of faith with the sun shining and the birds singing. Joyful days!
Other times, (and I think these are common so that God can stretch your faith and prove Himself to you), you walk into a fog and there seems no end of it.
Will the fog ever lift? Yes. Someday. It might not be today.
Is HIS GRACE really sufficient for you, personally? Yes.
Take fresh courage today.
Believe the writer of Hebrews. “For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.”
As Winston Churchill once very possibly declared,
“If you’re going through Hell, keep going…”
By Carl Wesley Anderson, 11/11/2017
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Do you have a story of enduring through a season of fog? Or a favorite Scripture on endurance? Share it with us! Blessings, Carl