Thought Based on Psalm 107:23-32
Life can sometimes take you to your limits. It takes you to places where you know you can't stand any more, only to discover there that somehow, some way, a spark of strength remains you never knew you had. You discover that your limits are not your demise but that God in you enables you to keep on pressing on.
Some days you want to retreat and throw-in-the-towel because you know you can't go on, that you have reached the end of your resources. Some days you are tempted to call into question that awesome Biblical promise on which you have relied so often, "God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able..." (I Cor. 10:13). Some days you fall, exhausted, into the dust, and know you have reached your wits' end.
In that desert place, however, God is at work. You can't always see Him and you don't always have a visible handle on how He is at work. He is at work, though, because somehow, some way, you find yourself getting out of the dust, brushing yourself off and continuing on the journey.
There is a grace in being at wits' end. Oswald Chambers has a wonderful word about this. He says, "When a man is at his wits' end it is not a cowardly thing to pray, it is the only way he can get into touch with Reality"(Oswald Chambers, My Utmost For His Highest(Westwood, NJ: Barbour and Company, Inc., 1935, 1963) 241). Wits' end leads to reality. What an interesting thought.
The desert leads to truth. The desert leads to reality. The desert leads to God. That which at certain times leads you to believe you are going to die is actually leading you to your only true source of life. Wits' end is not the moment of despair; rather, it is the place where one is invited to meet the One True God.
At wits' end you recognize you are not self-sufficient and that the world does not revolve around you. You recognize your limits and come to know that ultimately and finally, in so many areas, you are powerless. At the moment of recognition one of two things can happen. You can get bitter and withdraw deeper and deeper into your pain, or you can see, by faith, possibilities you never saw before. At that moment Oswald Chambers helps up again. He says,
Be yourself before God and present your problems, the things you know you have come to your wits' end over. As long as you are self-sufficient, you do not need to ask God for anything… It is not so true that "Prayer changes things" as that prayer changes me and I change things. God has so constituted things that prayer on the basis of redemption alters the way in which a man looks at things. Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man's disposition.
Maybe that is what the desert place is about after all -- exposing our false sense of self-sufficiency; facing our inner selves and praying not so much that things may change but that we may be changed in the things. I have been to the desert and there I learned that "Prayer is not a question of altering things externally, but of working wonders in a man's disposition" (Chambers).
It occurs to me that in this thing called life, I am the one who needs to be worked on. God is not the problem here. I am. The desert, wits' end, is my divine opportunity to "Give Jesus Christ a chance, give Him elbow room." I want to call being at wits' end of the devil. Maybe, however, it is the place of grace where I meet, not the devil, but God, the place where I am invited to invite God in, and in His presence, "to get into touch with reality" (Chambers)
Suddenly, wits' end is the sacramental table where grace is extended into my life and where, being confronted by my lack of sufficiency, I discover the all-sufficiency of the God who meets me right where I am.
