Tuesday: The Game of the Hour
WEEK 22
TUESDAY
THE GAME OF THE HOUR
1 Peter 1:6-7
We have been noting the mastery of opposition and unmerited trouble and suffering. These people had the spiritual equivalent of the modern puncture-proof tire, which heals as quickly as it is punctured. They closed in immediately on wounds and healed them by the grace that was within them. And they did it quickly.
In over thirty years I’ve had many shocks and disappointments and sorrows, but I’ve found by God’s grace that I could recover within the hour. Within the hour the equilibrium could be attained, and peace and joy were back again. It is a good game to play, the Game of the Hour. The hour is par. See if you can recover poise and victory within the hour. You can master many smaller shocks and reverses in a matter of seconds or minutes. But take the big ones and make them yield to victory within the hour. They, of course, may not be solved within the hour, but our attitudes toward them can be solved within the hour. By surrender of the problem into the hands of Christ and trusting him for guidance in the solution, you can regain your poise and inner confidence and be in a position to meet the problem constructively by God’s grace and power.
A nationally known woman—creator of sixty-five charm schools across the country—had a nationwide radio hour and dealt with millions. She was converted under strange circumstances. While it seemed she was on top of her world of charm, she was inwardly miserable and unhappy and spiritually hungry. She took a book into her room, thinking it was a book on the history of New England, but it was Pilgrim’s Progress. She was converted then and there. She walked out of her millions and misery into mastery. She had many difficult adjustments to make, for her former world of charm felt she had let them down, and the Christian world was not sure her conversion was real. She tells me that the Game of the Hour is working. She is enabled to adjust herself to every hard problem and hard bump within the hour.
O Lord, give me that resilience of spirit that can come back from any sorrow and shock and come back quickly. Help me to foreshorten my period of shocks. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: Today all my periods of recovery shall be below par, for I shall draw heavily on grace.