THE FLOOR ATTACKED ME!

When we lived in Los Angeles, our family attended The Church on the Way in Van Nuys. In those days there were four services on Sunday mornings and we attended the second one, which began at 8:30. After the service we would often go for breakfast/brunch with our longtime friends Dick and Dee Eastman and their girls.

One Sunday, as we were waiting for a table at the restaurant, the children were playing outside. Our daughter Leslie didn’t see the splinter on the redwood handrail until it was too late. The splinter went through the outer portion of her palm and came out the other side of her hand. We rushed her down the street a few blocks to the emergency room where the doctor assured us that everything would be fine and Mom and Dad could stop worrying.

As the doctor was numbing my daughter’s hand with novocaine, one of the nurses sagely suggested that perhaps it would be best for me to wait in the hallway. They were going to perform minor surgery on Leslie’s hand to make sure they got all the redwood splinters out. Tough guy that I am (in my dreams) I told the nurse that I was fine and I wanted to stay with my daughter.

The moment I saw the doctor begin to cut on my daughter’s hand, I had second thoughts and realized that the nurse had given me a word of wisdom. I walked out into the hallway where Carol and our daughter Barb were and suddenly I was attacked by the floor. The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back on a gurney and a very pretty blond nurse was looking down at me. She grinned and said, “How come it’s always the big guys who faint?”

Thirty years later, I’m still trying to figure that one out and Dr. Phil hasn’t helped at all. Now that I’ve told you about one of my recurring nightmares (pretty nurses making fun of me, not the splinter in my daughter’s hand), let me share a verse of Scripture that has challenged and strengthened me for years. Proverbs 24:10: “If you faint in the day of adversity, your strength is small.”

Let’s dissect this Scripture.

The word “faint” means to become so disheartened over something—some act, some event—so discouraged that you just give up and walk away.

We think we understand the word “day.” Yes, it does refer to the 24-hour time period that we know as a day. However, as it is used here, the word is referring to that portion of the day when the temperature, the heat of the day, reaches its hottest point. The most likely point of failure is when the heat of adversity is at its peak.

The word “strength” is referring to the ability to get things done, to stay in the fight until the battle is over.

The word “small” as it is used here means that you have overestimated your strength and it is not what you think it is. There is just the hint here of a prideful, haughty, pretentious attitude. “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18).

So the New International Revised Patterson Amplification of this verse would go like this: “If you fade when the going gets hot, you never did have the strength you thought you had. Let it be a lesson to you so that you can grow in God and not make that mistake again.”

Adversity is the testing ground of faith. It is in times of stress and challenge that we find out just how mature we are in our faith. This verse is meant to help us have a clear view about ourselves.

We don’t have faith by simply saying we have faith. We have faith by embracing our life in Christ, declaring that we are His and then relying on Him as we live out our lives in the real world. For some of us it will be the faith to believe that our family will not be dysfunctional the way our parents were. For others it will be the faith to be a success in business and a good witness for Christ at the same time. For some it will be the faith to hang in there when your marriage hits a rough patch. For others it will involve “faith ventures” of taking Christ’s message of love and salvation to people that have not yet heard His name.

“What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead” (James 2:14-17 NIV).