Sometimes we have times in life where we feel stale. Inwardly and outwardly we can detect little growth or change; our goals seem distant and what we are doing appears to be of questionable value. Perhaps you have felt something of this in the last few days? My hunch is that you may well have done. There is something in the ‘spiritual air’ at the moment. There is a holy dissatisfaction around. And its a good thing. A very good thing.

One of the greatest enemy assignments against us is apathy, that feeling of not caring if things are going belly up… that feeling of watching a ship slowly sink and doing nothing about it. This week I had a picture for a friend of ours. He is doing a job that someone else could do. He’s good at it, in a ‘I don’t give a monkeys’ kind of way. But it doesn’t put any fire in his soul. The image I had of him was of him simply treading water.

The lie of the enemy when we are in a place like this is that nothing is happening. But as I looked at my friend, in this time of seeming stagnation, I was drawn to focus on something else. You see, even in the place of treading water three things are happening:

1. You are exercising your muscles
2. You are oxygenating the very water that you are treading in.
3. You feel fairly alone

None of these things is insignificant.
Even in the space of waiting for a new dream to be born, or for a new alignment or assignment, God IS at work. He is secretly building spiritual stamina and muscle. He is allowing new air to be breathed and He is giving fresh oxygen to the lungs. He is proving Himself capable of trust.

I got excited for my friend. Rather than a stale, stagnant, sterile space, he is in fact in the rightest, ripest position of all. By treading water he is actually in a place of growth, change and new hope. He just doesn’t know it yet.