In the midst of Scout Camp in the north Georgia Mountains, about fifteen or twenty of us were working on the Lifesaving Merit Badge. We were practicing the proper way to bring drowning victims out of a body of water and how to begin providing first aid to them, when one of the instructors asked us all a question: “Where do you go for help if you can’t handle the situation on your own?”
Our instructor wanted us to remember that we were all teenage boys and there would be times when the skills we were learning would not be sufficient to provide safe care for such victims. Those words have stuck in my mind: “Where do you go for help if you can’t handle the situation on your own?”
The Psalmist was in one of those life moments when he felt as though complication piled on top of complication until his life was nearly at an end. His closest friends had been taken from him; he had suffered physical, emotional, and spiritual distress since he was a youth. Many of us would simply want to give up. Instead of collapsing in self-pity, the Psalmist continued to turn to God, day in and day out. He kept his life centered in prayers to the Lord, knowing where he should turn when he wasn’t able to handle the situation on his own.
On any given day, our worlds can turn completely upside down; in those moments we each have the choice of how will we handle the distress. Do we turn to God and allow our prayers to call out to Him day and night, or do we become mired in the belief that we cannot handle the situation? The challenge comes when we do not already have the beginning of a relationship with the Almighty—when we only come before Him in the moments when our lives have reached a flash point and we feel as though God is our last resort.