What If Your Burden Is Part Of A Bigger Plan

A contact lens goes missing halfway up a granite cliff, and what happens next is so unlikely it sticks with you for years. We tell the story of Brenda, a young woman who agrees to go rock climbing even though she’s scared to death, then faces a new kind of fear when her vision turns blurry and she can’t find what she lost. In that moment, the question gets painfully simple: do you spiral, or do you pray and keep moving one step at a time?

From there, we zoom out to the bigger theme behind the story: the loads we carry that we never asked for and why suffering can feel pointless.  Faith often includes uncertainty, and trusting God doesn’t always mean getting instant answers. We lean on Psalm 138:8 as a steady anchor and unpack a line many people repeat for a reason: God doesn’t call the qualified, He qualifies the called. If you’re walking through a hard season, this is a five-minute reset for your mind and your spirit.
 Sometimes God does a miracle to help you find what you think you’ve lost, and other times He gives you the strength to carry what you don’t yet understand. If this helped you, subscribe for a weekday start, share it with a friend who’s carrying a heavy load, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

Brenda’s Scary Climb Begins

The Contact Lens Disappears

The Ant With The Answer

A Prayer On The Mountain

Carrying Loads You Didn’t Choose

God Qualifies The Called

Encouragement For Hard Seasons

Goodbye And Invitation To Return

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Good morning and welcome to Starting Right with Danny Mack. I'm going to be here every Monday to Friday to help you get a great five-minute start to your day. So grab your cup of coffee, sit back, relax, and let me help you start your day right. I've got a new story for you today. It's about a young woman named Brenda who was invited to go rock climbing. And although she was scared to death, she went with her group of friends to this giant granite cliff. She looked up at the cliff completely filled with fear, but she put on the gear, took a hold of the rope, and started to climb up the face of the rock. Well, she got to a ledge where she could take a breather, and as she was hanging there, the safety rope snapped against her eye and knocked out her contact lens. Well here she was on a rock ledge with hundreds of feet below her and hundreds of feet above her. Of course she looked and looked, hoping that the lens had landed on the ledge, but it just wasn't there. Here she was, far from home, her sight now blurry, she was desperate and began to get upset, so she prayed to the Lord to help her find it. When she got to the top of the cliff, a friend examined her eye and her clothing for the lens, but there was no contact lens to be found. She sat down almost in tears with those who had already made it to the top, waiting for the rest of them to make it up the face of the cliff. She looked out across the range of mountains, thinking of that Bible verse that says The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth. She thought, Lord, you can see all these mountains. You know every stone and leaf, and you know exactly where my contact lens is. Please, God help me. Finally they walked down the easy way to the bottom of the cliff. And at the bottom there was a new party of climbers just starting up the face. One of them shouted out, Hey you guys, anybody lost a contact lens? Well that would be startling enough. But you know why the climber saw it? There was an ant moving slowly across the face of the rock carrying the contact lens. Brenda's father was a cartoonist, and when she told him the incredible story of the ant, the prayer and the contact lens, he drew a picture of an ant lugging a contact lens with the words Lord, I don't know why you want me to carry this thing. I can't eat it, and it's awful heavy. But if this is what you want me to do, I'll carry it for you. Sometimes we don't understand why we go through the things that we do. We believe God is with us, we believe he's guiding us, that his hand is on us, and yet we find ourselves often carrying loads that we didn't expect, that we don't want, and that we somehow have to deal with. And at that point we have choices to make, whether to get upset with God in the situation we're in, or to realize that maybe God is trying to do something. Psalm 138, verse 8 says, The Lord will work out his plans for my life, for your faithful love, O Lord, endures forever. I think it would probably do us all some good occasionally to say, God, I don't know why you want me to carry this load. I can't see any good in it, and it's awfully heavy. But if you want me to carry it, I will. You see, God doesn't call the qualified. He qualifies the called. And if he's called you and you find that you have to carry a burden of some kind for a while, God qualifies you to do that. He gives you the strength, the wisdom, and the understanding to do it, to be able to get through that valley that you're going through. The other side of the valley will be reached because God is giving you what you need to get there. And we need to remember that sometimes we go through difficult, trying, hard times, because it's not just about us. It's about God's plan for the people around us, maybe even people that we will never know until we get to heaven. But God uses those difficult times in our lives to qualify us, to help us become more and more like Him, so that His plans can be fulfilled in the people and the world around us. So when you're going through tough times, hang on. Don't give up. God will work for you and in you. He's not going to abandon you. And sometimes He may do a miracle to help us find what we think we've lost, and at other times He may ask us to carry something that we don't know why we need to carry it. And yet God has got a plan and a purpose in it all. Have a great day, my friends. We will talk again tomorrow. Thank you for joining us today, and I invite you to join us every Monday to Friday, right here at Starting Right with Danny Mack.