By Richard Gazowsky
I’m standing in the midst of a spiritual tornado that’s surrounding my life, my company, and the church that I pastor. It seems like everything around me is being ripped from the ground. Nine people on my staff have been hit with physical, life-threatening conditions. Even people that are connected with us in Europe are facing the exact same problems. The thing that makes this so be overwhelming is that every case is unfixable by human hands. Only the hands of God have the ability to change the dire situations. It has put us in positions to where trusting Him has come to a whole new level.
A crazy thing is, not even the people closest to you seem to understand the gravity of the situations. They can sometimes come up with the most absurd things to say, or ask, at the wrong place, or at the wrong time. I’m not implying that I’m one of the victims– in almost every case, I’ve reacted the same way, which only added gasoline to the fire. It was at this point that the question hit me, “Who’s the one in David’s army, (when they arrived at Ziklag to find that all of their families had been kidnapped, and their city burnt down,) who came up with the idea, ‘Let’s stone David!’?” I hadn’t thought about that before. The Bible doesn’t say who the person was. If you analyze the situation, you would probably think, wow, for sure it was David’s worst enemy. When David was the most vulnerable, no doubt that person picked up the first stone to kill him. There’s no way to know. But I believe the reason is because that person was probably the most loved by David. After all, wasn’t it Peter who denied Christ at His most vulnerable moment? Didn’t Joseph’s own brothers who sold him into slavery? Wasn’t it Job’s wife that told him to curse God and die? It’s a shocking truth, but one of the tests that God gives us in the times of testing before promotion comes is that those who you love and work with, those closest to you, for a moment appear to turn against you.
My daughter Rocki had a dream where she was watching some children playing. Suddenly a pack of wild dogs rushed in and began to attack them. She and the other adults began to fight the wild dogs off to protect the kids when one vicious dog came at Rocki, she saw that it had human eyes. As she began kicking it and pushing it away, the dog suddenly turned into a man. Rocki continued to kick the man, even after he fell to the ground. Immediately, the Lord’s voice broke through her anger, and said, “Will you kick your brother when he’s down? He is a victim too.” Rocki realized that a spirit had jumped on her brother in the Lord and had caused him to lose control and turn against his own. She knew she must love and forgive him immediately.
I realize that in the midst of standing in the peace of the eye of the whirlwind, we must remember that this tranquility has been afforded us so that we have the ability to forgive those who are nearest to us and may not see the larger picture of how dangerous the tornado is. There is safety in the same place that David found. In the midst of his storm at Ziklag he found peace by encouraging himself in the Lord. Matter of fact, at that devestating moment he wrote one of his psalms.
The Apostle Paul said, “None of this fazes us, because Jesus loves us.”
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