How Hard You Can Get Hit
There is a scene in the recent Rocky Balboa movie Rocky’s son tries to confront his dad, and call him out on things, and pretty much blame him for not being the person that he wants to be. However, this little session didn’t turn out the way the son planned. You see, the son planned on ‘setting his father straight’ when what really ended up happening was his father setting HIM straight. In a little speech to his son after being confronted, Rocky tells his son that, ”The world aint all sunshine and rainbows. It’s a very mean and nasty place and I don’t care how tough you are it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently… if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t about how hard ya hit. It’s about how hard you can get it and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward. Now if you know what you’re worth then go out and get what you’re worth. But ya gotta be willing to take the hits, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you wanna be because of him, or her, or anybody!”
Upon just recently watching that scene, I saw it in a whole different perspective. This confrontation between this man and his son can be compared to a our confrontations with us and God. I mean let’s face it, whether we’re call ourselves Christians, Catholics, Jews, White, Black, or whatever, life can really suck from time to time. However, its how we react to these situations. Many time when life throws us a curve ball, we get all upset and start pointing fingers at whoever or whatever is around. We even rush to point fingers at God and ask him how He can do this to us. We get upset and try to rationalize with God. We tell him how we go to church every Sunday. We tell him how we wear shirts with scriptures on them. And we even ask if he remembers how even though we were in a rush, we stopped to help a little old lady across the street. And with our fingers pointed to the sky, we demand that God be ”fair” and hold up His end of the bargain. I mean we do all these ”good” things, doesnt God owe us a little bit????
Well like Rocky said, it aint about how hard you can hit, It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. Or in our case, how hard we can get hit and keep our faith in God.
You see, many times when situations arise in our life, it isn’t because God wants to punish us. It’s because He wants to expose all the nasty stuff in our life so there is room for what he wants in our life. Like a challenge from God to claim a larger blessing. Instead of asking why something is happening, why don’t we ask God what He is trying to teach us through this, because, it is through suffering and through tests that we draw closer than ever to God. God never closes one door in our life without opening another, and He’ll never expose us of what we may be hanging onto to shame us or condemn us. But in fact He wants to redeem us and set us free from it so we don’t have to keep hanging onto it and trying to keep it covered up.
From personal experience, I’ve found that when God has a plan and a purpose for someone’s life, He will get through to us one way or another. And at the time, it may even hurt a little and we may shout and yell at God because things may not be going the way we planned them, but be rest assured, that whatever God’s plan is, it will be 5000 times better than we we could have even imagined.
So when situations arise and we can do one of two things. We can go off confronting and blaming God and cursing Him out because he’s not being ”fair” and totally miss out on God’s opportunity to expose and fix the things in our lives we may have been struggling with, OR we can try to sit back, take it all in, press into God, and after the little storm, we end up getting the wake up call and see what God really had in store for us.
