Hello,
This week saw the final of the popular TV programme I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here, watched by over 6 million people. It’s a show where contestants are dropped into an Australian jungle, stripped of comforts and pushed to face trials they never asked for, including confronting spiders, snakes, lack of food, and embarrassing challenges.
Sound familiar? Maybe you’re not eating bugs in the jungle, but life often feels like a series of unexpected trials: situations we didn’t choose, fears we’d rather avoid, situations that stretch our patience, pressures that test our faith. Sometimes we want to cry out, ‘Lord, get me out of here’, but often our experience is that God doesn’t get us out of a trial, rather he promises to be with us and get us through it.
In the show each trial has a purpose. The challenges make the contestants stronger, braver, humbler, and more reliant on each other, with the added bonus of providing a meal for the camp.
In our walk with Christ, trials do something similar. The Apostle James counsels us to ‘Consider it pure joy…whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.’ (James 1:2–4 NIVUK).
We may want escape, but God wants growth. So, instead of saying to God, ‘Get me out of here’, why not pray, ‘God, walk through this with me’? In this way a trial or a challenge can become a testimony to his presence and faithfulness.
In Christian love,
Barry Robinson
About the Writer:
Barry Robinson is the Deputy National Ministry Leader for GCI in the UK & Ireland