Day by day I am meeting more people who are down and out, despondent, depressed and discouraged by a recent turn of events in their lives. Many have lost their jobs, homes, families, friends – and they feel that their lives are spinning completely out of control. Some have even considered taking their own lives. They are living under siege; held hostage by misfortune and circumstances.
One man summed it up in a very interesting way. He said that their lives have simply hit “rock’s bottom,” where everything just seems to them to be an uphill climb out of a dark and endless pit. This man was expressing what many of us are seeing, that too many people feel they are living under the crushing weight of a heavy rock. When you feel that your life no longer has meaning and you are living “at the bottom of the rock,” you may have truly reach the lowest point of your life.
But there is hope even for those whose lives have come to this dark and dismal place. There are several options available to you.
First, you can remain contented with your current resting place, tucked neatly underneath the rock. You can resign yourself to stay there and just dig deeper into the hole and remain there forever. Here you will have no worries and you can make peace with the darkness in which you now find yourself. You have felt the crushing weight of the rock pushing you further into the hole and thus resigned yourself to never come out from under the rock. You have now made peace with your situation and can just remain there “at rock’s bottom,” forever.
Second, you can become the rock. You can decide to take on the characteristics of the rock and morph yourself into an ossified, fossilized form of existence. You may take on the rock’s hardness and strength, vowing to forever insulate yourself from the sharp pangs of reality, the stabbing blows of life’s daily trials and disappointments. You are now strong and immovable like the rock, but in becoming the rock you lose your capacity to feel life and be fully human. With your hard, cold, strong exterior, there is nothing warm and alive within you. Nothing fazes you because nothing now touches you. You are now an inanimate object devoid of feelings and compassion and the true sentiments that make you a true human being.
Third, you can resolve to neither take refuge under the rock, become dispassionate in becoming a rock – but instead, your life can be moved in another direction by a guiding hand. You can make the choice to allow yourself to be changed. You cannot move on your own because something outside of yourself must move you. And we do not know where this next step will take you.
Someone greater than you must pick you up in His hands and use you, and mold you, and move you. Perhaps in your new life you will be thrown into deep, still waters to make ripples on the surface or planted firmly in solid ground to provide support for someone who is needing to lean on you, to use you as a pillar of strength and support. Perhaps God can use you as a dependable tool to sharpen other rocks or build something of lasting purpose and value.
In this sense, you are not living under a rock, you are not just becoming a rock, you are being formed to be utilized as something more. You are no longer “at rock’s bottom,” but you are now in top form. You are now so much more than a person at the mercy of a lowly object but you are being formed to be used in the masters hands for a specific purpose. Your life has value because your life and existence have moved to higher ground.
When you hit rock bottom, you don’t have to become the bottom of the rock. Life still awaits you. Goodness still surrounds you. There is still so much more of your life that God has in store for you. In the hands of God, you can find value and usefulness that you never thought you had.
Let God take you into his hands and mold you further, and use you for greater purposes and know that life can truly be worthwhile despite the fact that you’re hitting the “rock’s bottom.”
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