Doing the Hard Thing

Below is the daily Bible reading I am doing for the West Side Church. Please feel free to follow along.

Have you ever been asked to do something that you knew was going to be difficult. Maybe it was an assignment at work or school. Maybe it was helping a friend in need. Maybe it was looking after a family member during their cancer treatments. Maybe it is a project you are working on with your church. You have seen things like that play out before and you are fully aware of what you are going through. Today’s reading (Mark 10) highlights an event in Jesus life that he knew was going to be difficult.

Jesus is nearing the end of his life. He knows what is going to happen to him and that is displayed in what he says … “We are going up to Jerusalem, and the son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priest and teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand him over to the Gentile, who will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.” Jesus described in eerie details what was soon going to happen to his life. We see him later in the garden of Gethsemane praying that cup be taken from him, but since that would not be the Fathers will he was willing to go through with it. Jesus had a difficult task that he was going to go through with no matter what.

How do you handle difficult tasks? Do you dread them and put them off? Or do you do stand up, take action and nip them in the bud? I remember in elementary school when they taught us good techniques to study homework, they always taught us to do the hardest thing first. Get it out of the way, take care of it, and all of the frustration will be gone. I think we can apply that to many situations in life. Get the hard, difficult, challenging, undesirable things out of the way. Rely on the strength of God, just as Christ did in the garden and plug on through. We serve an amazing God who has promised to see us through. Rely on that promise.