When You are Really Stuck
A pastor called me recently and asked about a parishioner who was stuck. The young man in question has a good work ethic, reasonably consistent character, has been through a lot of prayer for the seven curses, but simply cannot get enough economic momentum to get adequate housing for his family.
The pastor asked for more insight into which of the seven curses might apply but instead I proposed that this might be the 6th head of Leviathan. (See “Joy Unstoppable” the series on Leviathan’s seven heads).
This head deals with motion/flow/progress. The most common surface manifestation of trouble in this arena is when traveling becomes a complicated process — you know, ticket confusion, middle seats on the airplane, Old Leather Lungs sitting right behind you, and lost baggage. Another high drama manifestation is when transitions from jobs and homes are really unnecessarily long and messy.
But the most common manifestation of the negative side of the 6th head is when someone is just plain stuck and there is no forward progress at all in many areas of their life. Either there is a definable, unmovable obstacle, or there is just an endless swamp of meaningless trudging in front of you.
This is not from God. God often allows us to be in really tough situations, sometimes for a long season, but there are things which can and need to be done during that season so you progress through those seasons and actually do come out the other side.
I will be doing a series of blogs this coming week on the subject of the 6th head to break the whole idea down into bite sized pieces so we can see where the options are, when it appears there are no options.
OUR King always has one more move. And if we are subjects of the Great King, then it behooves us to learn to see the resources before us as He does, instead of only seeing the obstacles the enemy wants us to see.
Noble subjects are not powerless. They moved out of the powerlessness of being a loyal peasant, into a position of nobility by finding the available (but not obvious) resources and leveraging them with skill.
When we have been in the place of feeling powerless for a long time, it is too easy to enter into agreement with the enemy that we really are, rather than agreeing with the King’s reality.
Copyright October 2010 by Arthur Burk
On the Quarterdeck, Anaheim
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