Starting over

As part of my reading program this year, I am going through My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers. Chambers was a late 19th/Early 20th century (1874-1917) teacher and chaplain who died at the age of 43 while ministering to Australian and New Zealand troops in Egypt during World War I. It has been 15 or more years since I read the book, and I am struck (even as I am when I re-read other books) about the things that were there that I never saw before - or perhaps, were not so meaningful to me then. I am including the entire devotional for today's date, 18 February, as it speaks to what I have been mulling over recently, especially with the failure of the The Firm:

"TAKING THE INITIATIVE AGAINST DESPAIR

'Rise, let us be going (Matthew 26:46)'

In the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples went to sleep when they should have stayed awake, and once the realized what they had done it produced despair. The sense of having done something irreversible tends to make us despair. We say, "Well, it's all over and ruined now; what's the point in trying anymore." If we think this kind of despair is an exception, we are mistaken. It is a very ordinary human experience. Whenever we realize we have not taken advantage of a magnificent opportunity, we apt to sink into despair. But Jesus comes and lovingly says to us, in essence, "Sleep on now. That opportunity is lost forever and you can't change that. But get up, and let's go on to the next thing." In other words, let the past sleep, but let it sleep in the sweet embrace of Christ, and let us go on into the invincible future with Him.

There will be experiences like this in each of our lives. We will have times of despair caused by real events in our lives, and we will be unable to lift ourselves out of them. The disciples, in this instance, had done a downright unthinkable thing - they had gone to sleep instead of watching with Jesus. But our Lord came to them taking the spiritual initiative against their despair and said, in effect, "Get up, and do the next thing." If we are inspired by God, what is the next thing? It is to trust Him absolutely and to pray on the basis of His redemption.

Never let the sense of past failure defeat your next step."

- Chambers, Oswald. My Utmost for His Highest. Ed. James Reimann. Grand Rapids, MI: Discovery House Publishers, 1992. Entry for February 18th.

A daily online version of the devotional is here.