Maybe I Should Just Quit

Ever felt like quitting?  

In my sophomore year of college, I went through the most emotionally painful break up of my life. I had fallen head over heels for a girl and thought she might be “the one.” Suddenly, she started dating another guy and dumped me.

I fell a long way and sunk into a deep depression. I didn’t eat. Couldn’t study. My grades plummeted. Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. I called home to talk to Mom, but Mom wasn’t home. Dad was.

Desperate

I didn’t usually talk to Dad, but I was desperate.

In a low voice, I said, “Dad, I can’t keep doing this. I just want to come home. Maybe I’ll come back to school next year. Maybe I can get a job for a few months. I don’t know. But I can’t do it anymore. I want to quit.”

That was the first time I had said the words out loud. I felt both defeated and nervous. At 19 years old, I had never had a conversation like this with my father.

Dad’s reply was not what I expected. After a long pause, he said, “Roger, I have known you all your life, and you have never quit anything. I don’t think now is the time to start. It doesn’t take any guts quit.”

As much as I wanted him to say, “O.K. son, come on home,” I knew he was right. I wanted to quit just because it was hard. Thankfully, my Dad knew it’s supposed to be hard, and he didn’t let me use that as an excuse.

Turning Point

That was a turning point in my life. If I had quit there, I would have become a quitter. I would have learned that when life gets really hard, when the odds are stacked against you and the wheels are flying off in all directions, you just quit. You walk away, and you let somebody else pick up the pieces.

Every place I have been since my sophomore year, I have gone through some serious hardship. And each time, I’ve faced the same temptation, “Maybe I should just quit.”

One way to defuse that destructive thought is to admit to someone who truly cares about us that this is hard. When we do that, it can open a space inside us to see what is happening through God’s eyes.

God knows times of suffering are part of the human condition. We are either just coming out of one, in one right now, or have one coming our way.

Why?

But when we are right in the middle, we say, “Why am I having to deal with this? Why won’t God fix it, change it, take it away?”

Good question. Perhaps this terribly hard thing we are facing, this problem, this person, this loss, this situation, is a test. It could be the biggest test of our life, but it’s not like school. This is not about what we know. It’s about who we are. This is a test of our character.

This painful situation is meant to weed out the false gods in our life – those things we have depended on instead of the one, true God. Our self, our intellect, our abilities, our personality, our family, our friends, our money, our connections, none of these things can solve this problem. As much as we have tried, we can’t control it.

We may have prayed a hundred times, “God, take these circumstances away from me.” But God may choose not to do that. The truth is, God might like our circumstances. It could be that God has us right where he wants us, because now God can do some inside work on our character.

God may want to use this really hard time to separate us from selfishness and sin and reshape our hearts to fully follow God’s bidding. Suffering has a way of winnowing out the dead branches in our lives, so we can grow straight and true.

Reasons to Rejoice

The apostle Paul, who went through more than his share of painful trials for the Gospel, put it this way:

We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.             Romans 5:3-5 (NLT)

Surprisingly, suffering has a way of revealing God’s love. When we see our life through God’s eyes, our current suffering may lead to our greatest joy. It may be the very tool God uses to shape and mold our character, to do a work in us now, so God can do a work through us later.

Something Greater

Make no mistake, I didn’t want to break up with my dream girl in college, but God used that painful time to reshape my heart. It was just the first of many to come.

Slowly, I’ve come to trust that a hard time now will be used in the future for something greater. God doesn’t waste anything. We are too loved for that.

Someone might say, “Wait, are you saying there’s never a good time to quit?” I’ll talk about that next time.

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