Come, Lord, and show me your mercy, for I am helpless, overwhelmed, in deep distress.”
Psalm 25:16 (TLB)
Have you noticed how discouragement sets in at the midpoint of almost anything you do? It’s true in parenting, marriage, school, and in your career. But God has called you to finish the race he has prepared for you—and to finish it well.
When God put it on Nehemiah’s heart to rebuild Jerusalem after the Israelites’ returned from captivity, they began the work of rebuilding the city’s walls. But when “the wall was completed to half its height around the entire city” (Nehemiah 4:6 NLT), the people became discouraged.
The story of Nehemiah describes four common reasons people get discouraged. Today we’ll look at the first two.
The first cause of discouragement is fatigue. Nehemiah 4:10 says, “Then the people of Judah began to complain, ‘The workers are getting tired’” (NLT). Rebuilding anything, of course, is exhausting. They had worked hard on the first half of the project, but they soon grew weary and worn down. They were more vulnerable to attacks from their enemies, physically and spiritually.
Nehemiah’s workers offer an important lesson for you today: Because discouragement is often the result of being tired. When you’ve had plenty of rest, you’re less vulnerable to self-pity, temptation, and attack from others.
The second cause of discouragement is frustration. Not only were the Israelites fatigued; they were frustrated: “There is so much rubble to be moved. We will never be able to build the wall by ourselves” (Nehemiah 4:10 NLT). The project was more complex than they thought it was going to be. The ruin and rubble of their destroyed city was almost too much to handle.
The thing about rubble is you will always have it in your life. You live on a broken planet, so there’s no way to avoid it. But you can learn how to manage rubble to minimize frustration. How do you do that? By continually cleaning it out of your life. You can start by praying Psalm 25:16: “Come, Lord, and show me your mercy, for I am helpless, overwhelmed, in deep distress” (TLB).
Globalization and the attendant concerns about poverty and inequality have become a focus of discussion in a way that few other topics, except for international terrorism or global warming, have. Most people have a strong opinion on globalization, and all of them express an interest in the well-being of the world's poor. The financial press and influential international officials confidently assert that global free markets expand the horizons for the poor, whereas activist-protesters hold the opposite belief with equal intensity. Yet the strength of people's conviction is often in inverse proportion to the amount of robust factual evidence they have.As is common in contentious public debates, different people mean different things by the same word. Some interpret "globalization" to mean the global reach of communications technology and capital movements, some think of the outsourcing by domestic companies in rich countries, and others see globalization as a byword for
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