What.A.Week.
With a half day, Election Day, and an eLearning day at school, plus baseball games, speech therapy, and Alex being out of town, life has been a wee bit crazy over the past five days.
To be honest, my whole fall has been a tad overwhelming. There have been times I have felt like I’m in a game of dodgeball, where I’m the only one left on my side, and all of these balls keep flying at me, and there’s nothing I can do to fight them off or make them stop pummeling me. Some days, I’d really rather just curl into a ball with my arms over my head and wait until things settle down, but I know deep down that’s not the way to win at dodgeball or at life.
Patches O’Houlihan, the greatest dodgeball coach of all time, would tell me the way to win in dodgeball is to utilize the five D’s: dodge, duck, dip, dive, and dodge. And those moves may help a team of average Joe’s win the Las Vegas Dodgeball Championship, but they don’t really enable me to conquer the challenges, responsibilities, and occasional wrenches coming at me every day.
What Patches’ advice forgets is that one of the best strategies to win at dodgeball is to actually stand still, catch a ball, hold onto it, and use it to fend off the other balls. And the ball we specifically need to grab onto is the one with God’s name on it.
See, we can duck and dive, dip and dodge, cower and cover our heads, but that doesn’t stop the hailstorm of life that’s raining down on us. When we stand up and cling tightly to Jesus, though, that’s when we can start taking care of business.
Throughout the Psalms, God is compared to a shield, which I’m sure was helpful to the Israelites who were used to going into battle, but it doesn’t do too much for me. I don’t know a lot about BC-era weaponry, but dodgeballs? As a mom, a teacher with recess duty, and a camp counselor, that’s an analogy I can really get behind. (See what I did there.) To me, God is a dodgeball, going before me, protecting me, and giving me something to hold on to.
I’m fairly certain a dodgeball was exactly what Moses was thinking of when he wrote Deuteronomy 1:30: The Lord your God, who is going before you, will fight for you, as he did for you in Egypt, before your very eyes. Moses was reminding his people that they weren’t alone. They had seen God bring them through hard times, and Moses wanted them to remember God was still walking before them.
The same is true for us today. Life may throw tough stuff at us, but we never have to handle it by ourselves. God is always on our side, our first line of defense, shielding us, and helping us manage everything that comes our way.
So, when you’re feeling overwhelmed, grab on to God. Hold him out in front of you and let him protect you. He can, he has, and he will.