I’m not sure most of us are told to be sure we bring a large portion of endurance with us for our journey through life. It’s common to be reminded to get education, experience, and assorted other things we will need to handle the ups and downs life will hand us from nearly the time we arrive on earth. No one ever told me or likely you to be sure to pack endurance or where to locate it. But it is a necessary companion for us beginning very early in our lives and we need a healthy supply of it until we finish the journey.

Endurance is the power or capacity to last or withstand difficult circumstances, situations, or events without giving way. Lessons on it begin as infants and toddlers when we cannot fend for ourselves and must wait on others to tend to our needs and desires. As children we learn it after accidents on playgrounds and backyard swings and before long, we learn it in disappointment with friends and challenges in school.

My recent accident has reminded me of my need of endurance once again. Endurance always includes waiting for something we want, need, or hope for and if we are honest, none of us are excellent at it most of the time. We tend to have a low tolerance for putting off comfort or things we desire, relief from pain or disappointment. And it is in this waiting that we are often tempted to doubt.

Will anyone see that our cup is empty of whatever we need and fill it? Will they recognize we cannot sort out how to handle what we are facing and may not even know what it is that we need? Will they think we are weak or asking too much if we need them to listen longer or run another errand? Will they still remember the journey is long as we endure loss and grief long after we leave the cemetery or hospital room? Will they accept us when we have always seemed so strong as if we have it all together when we do not? Will they do a better job of listening than offering advice and opinions? Those questions and many others like them are not easy to answer with what we believe would be the most caring and loving because they require something more from us than the offer of a quick prayer and some other kindness.

In the physical realm I have learned a lot about endurance from working with a physical trainer. Exercise and any sporting activity has never been my forte or strong skill set but as I have gotten older, I am very much aware of the need to strengthen my body to be able to keep doing what I would like and to keep me as healthy as possible for as long as possible. Working with Matt in strength training means you will often hear him asking me to do something I am convinced I cannot do. My response will be, “Matt, do you remember how old I am?” He will listen and then tell me that he knows I can do it and persuade me to trust his knowledge of what I am capable of. And I discover I can manage the weight and hold for another 30 seconds or do another repetition after all.

Too often in my life I have exercised the “I can’t” muscle either because I lacked the skill or because I lacked the confidence to even try or because someone had something that created doubt. Matt has beaten back that muscle teaching me a lot about the “I can” muscle that was weaker from lack of use.

Sometimes we don’t make the choice to try because we fear failure that can cripple us if we allow it to rule us. Sometimes we don’t make the choice because to gain endurance we must be willing to be tested and work beyond what we believe are our limits and that seems like a mountain too high and far to climb. But of all these things, I have learned much about endurance from what I read in scripture and how often we are exhorted to gain and hold on to endurance.

In Paul’s letter to the Romans in the New Testament, he lays out where we find endurance:

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. ² Through him we have also obtained access by faith, into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. ³ Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴ and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵ and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

Romans 5: 1-5 (ESV)

If these are not verses you know or know well, go back, and read them again as Paul plainly tells us that it is suffering that produces endurance. Little wonder we don’t go looking for endurance since few of us volunteer to suffer even though it will come to each of us at some point in time in our life. In order to gain endurance, we must grapple with something, suffer through something – sometimes for a very long time. Most of us don’t want to do that anymore than I want to hold a plank with my trainer for another full minute. How we wish life were easier or we could pick and choose the challenges we need to face. But that isn’t life, is it? And if we live long enough, we will have multiple opportunities to grow in our endurance, not only physically, but emotionally, relationally, mentally, economically, and most definitely spiritually as well.

But Paul isn’t the only writer who speaks of endurance in scripture, the writer of Hebrews has one of my favorite passages tucked inside:

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, ² looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”

Hebrews 12: 1-2 (ESV)

There it is again, the exhortation to endure and a clear reminder that Jesus endured the cross and suffered unimaginable things for each of us. How much we need to learn from Him and see in his character. We want hard things to be over. We are more eager for his return so the difficulties of this life will end than because we are eager to be with the One who loves us with such a great everlasting sacrificial love.

As we are called to endure and persevere in the midst of difficult things, painful things, and uncertain things, John reminds us in the final book of the New Testament of what we will gain by doing so as he writes the letters to the churches in the second and third chapter.

Many of you are in a season where you are called to endure or persevere not unlike me after the accident I suffered 3 weeks ago with more dental appointments ahead and no certainty of outcome. Sometimes we sense God’s presence in those defining moments but if we do not, we might be tempted to doubt He is there, is good, or sees what is happening. In that moment or length of time, we are called to endure. God is with us. Of that I am sure, but it does not mean we will not experience pain or need to wait or face hard things. Nothing in his story, the Bible, tells us that about this life. He promises to be with us in the midst of whatever we face, and He is always enough even if we are not.

It was December 27 and after spending a few days over Christmas with our daughter and her family, we were heading home for a few days for some non-rescheduled medical appointments. Within six days we would return to their home to fly to TX for our oldest grandson’s wedding. Not unlike many families who’re spread out across many miles, it was a busy travel season full of some exciting things.

In between those great plans life can hand you an unexpected moment in time that upends your plans. And so, it was for us on December 27 as we traveled a turnpike well known to us. It was a cloudy winter day, good travel conditions for a winter day versus so many days we have traveled in snow or icy conditions. As we stopped at a service plaza, I could not have anticipated what would happen next.

As my husband retrieved something from the back of our SUV, I walked around the front of the vehicle to get something out of the driver’s side back door. What I missed was a patch of black ice on the slightly sloped sidewalk. I suddenly felt my feet slip and propel me forward with no warning. The next moment I was face down on the sidewalk in the leftover snow and slush bleeding from my nose, mouth, lips and uncertain where else. It all seemed surreal in that moment as my husband lowered the rear hatch and was stunned to see me face down with blood running over the sidewalk.

I only knew I didn’t want to get up and wasn’t sure that I could, and people were running from multiple directions to where I lay. Strangers. Faces I did not see except a glimpse here and there. They came with questions about whether I could get up. They ran into the plaza and came back with paper towels for me to hold over my face where it was bleeding. They got ice from the plaza and someone brought over a metal chair from the outdoor plaza, and gently insisted that I had to get up. They helped me get seated on the chair as I was shivering and so cold from the shock of the fall.

One woman brought a blanket and stood behind me with it wrapped around my shoulders to try to get me warm and called for others to bring blankets. Another woman called 911. Someone else said she was an ICU nurse and stopped to check on me and later a physician who asked me to take the paper towels away to see where I was bleeding. She said she thought my nose was broken, asked me my first name, and spent time looking carefully into my eyes checking for I did not know what. In my mouth she thought I had broken off a front tooth and asked me if I had aspirated it. All the while the lady behind me with the blanket with such a kind voice kept holding me as close as she could to try to stop my shaking and called for others to stand around me to try to block the wind.

Who were they?

These strangers (Good Samaritans) on their own trips who came to care for me, reassure me, help me, advocate for me as the ambulance could not get to me in the plaza area due to a bus blocking the path which had gotten into a ditch. It can be easy to be suspect of strangers in these times, but here they were helping this bleeding, shaking, disoriented grandmother without thought for where their own journeys were to take them on December 27.

Most of their faces I did not see as I held paper towels to my face that repeatedly soaked with blood. I did not hear any of their names. I only felt them and heard them as they insisted that I could not walk to where the ambulance was when that idea was suggested nor that I could get in a pickup truck available to drive me there. They didn’t know me nor the extent of my injuries but on this day, they became forever etched in my memory.

Our pastor had been doing an excellent series in December entitled “Defining Moments with God” that focused on the many instances where God appeared in one form or another beginning in Genesis and at so many places in the Old Testament long before we get to the Christmas scene in Bethlehem. I felt like I was living that story December 27.

We have such a limited sense or view of what God is like or how He works or makes his presence known to us. We are finite trying to understand an infinite God without limits. Sometimes we wonder if He is there with us when our world turns upside down and a crisis or trauma occurs.

Was He the one who stood behind the chair trying to warm me with a blanket someone else brought, holding me, and speaking words of reassurance? What was their faith, their nationality, their viewpoints on dozens of things? I will never know. What I will know and never forget were their hearts and hands that cared for me so tenderly, even as God would.

As I was helped into my husband’s car by the EMT from the ambulance so he could drive me to the ambulance, the sounds of the voices who had first cared for me echoed in my heart. They kept me encouraged as I waited in the emergency room of the hospital that was full of so many others needing help on that day.

In the long hours in the emergency room, my mind tried to sort out what was wrong and how it could be fixed. Then there came the question of whether this meant my husband and I would miss the wedding in TX not many days ahead. The physician who came to examine me had a gentle voice and kind eyes and reminded me of the grandson soon to be married and months away from receiving his medical degree. What a surprise to learn this doctor had graduated from the same medical school in FL. He ordered tests of various kinds, CT scans and x-rays expecting to find broken bones and aware my lower lip was gashed deep and needed stitches.

The uncertainty about my upper front teeth remained and my husband called our dentist at home to let him know what was happening and got an appointment for the very next day if we were able to get there. The surprising result of all the scans and tests and x-rays was that nothing was broken. The physician was shocked. I had fallen hard on my face like a tree being felled. I was a grandmother with a diagnosis of osteopenia and no bones were broken.

Who were they? Who were the unseen messengers God sent to protect me from broken bones that should certainly have been the result of such a fall? Certainly, God was there, just like so many other defining moments of God’s presence our pastor had been sharing with us.

My face recognition on my phone didn’t recognize me. My wedding rings could not fit on my finger. Bruises and swelling of my face and mouth were great and my left hand and right wrist were bruised as well, but after seven hours in the emergency room I was walking to our car to spend an unplanned night in a hotel procured and provided by our son for the night before heading home, but that wasn’t the only unexpected appearance of strangers on December 27.

From the emergency room my husband had called our son and daughter who live hundreds of miles from one another and each other. He reached both as they were doing life. Our daughter and her family were in New York City and had just stepped out of a subway when the call reached her. Her family immediately gathered in a circle in the subway station without regard to anyone else and began to pray for me. As they did some of the homeless in the area slipped in behind them and began to pray as well. When they finished, one man named Isaac told them, “I heard you praying for your mom, and I had to pray too. She is going to be all right and get complete healing.”

Who was he? Who was Isaac, this man without a home, but faith? It was not what one might expect. One of our granddaughters who was in that family circle observed, “Who knows? Maybe he was an angel.” Why not? We think of angels with wings and white robes, but is that true or always the case?

I have been absent from this place where we connect with each other because of the events of December 27 as I have been recovering. That dental appointment led to an oral surgery appointment the next day to try to bring my front teeth that had been jammed into their bone sockets down into place and followed with another dental appointment the next day. That was just 5 days before we were to return to our daughter’s to fly with them to TX for that grandson’s wedding. I was in pain and looked like I had been beaten up, but prayers were many from many places. Food arrived from friends from church to feed my husband even though I was limited to broth and pudding. Our driveway was cleared of snow and ice, A friend retrieved my bloody coat, gloves and purse and cleaned them and the love kept coming.

Who were all these people who interrupted their own lives to care for me and my husband?

This story is not over. I see the oral surgeon again today to find out how my mouth is doing and determine if the splint he put in my mouth to hold the teeth he tried to pull back down has done what was needed. Yes, I dread the appointment because I am not excited about anyone touching my mouth or squeezing my bruised hand very tightly, but God…

And God knew how much the wedding in TX meant to us and He helped the swelling and bruises to diminish in days that no one could believe, and we were delighted to be sitting there in the front row at our grandson’s wedding, an unlikely option given all that happened.

Who were they? God with us in defining moments of our lives…don’t miss Him!

For those who follow me regularly or visit often and have missed my posts, I wanted to be in touch to say I will have more to share in a couple of weeks. Travel home after Christmas resulted in an accident with me falling on black ice flat on my face. The story of how God’s presence was there in the midst despite trauma and oral surgery with more to come is one I hope will bless your hearts. In the meantime, your prayers for healing and all in the steps ahead will be gratefully appreciated.

Many blessings on each of you in your journey. Keep looking for God in unusual ways. Don’t miss his constant presence with you,