Caleb’s Prayer

My father’s favorite Bible story is in Joshua 14. As the Hebrew children are coming into the Promised Land, Caleb reminds Joshua that Moses had promised him the land “where his feet had already walked.” Now, Caleb was coming to Joshua to ask Joshua to fulfill God’s promise to him and give him Hebron. Caleb goes on to mention the Anakim are still living there in fortified cities. “Perhaps,” Caleb says, “the Lord will be with me.”

Here is what Caleb was asking. He wanted the Hebron. This would have been the most difficult land to fight on and therefore, the most difficult land to conquer. Their enemies were already living there and their cities were fortified. Caleb wanted the toughest part of the country with one of the toughest enemies dug in and waiting for him.

Some inheritance.

“Perhaps the Lord will be with me,” Caleb said. This was my dad’s Biblical hero.

I can still hear my dad enthusiastically retelling this story to his Sunday School class (my dad’s teaching style bordered on Pentecostal preaching). When he got to the climax of the story he would shout, “Lord, give me that mountain.”

That was the first time I had heard of any one volunteering for a hard assignment. My dad wanted to be trusted by God to do hard things. Like Caleb, he wanted God to give him the hard places, the tough assignments – the hard things. My father wanted to be God’s “go-to guy.” You know the person I’m talking about. Every organization has one. The “go-to-guy” is the person trusted by leadership to get things done. “The go-to guy” is the woman who can organize a team to solve the problem as the team walks down the hall going to the problem. She understands what happened. She knows what needs to be done to fix the problem and she knows who on her team is best at doing what. Assignments are made, expectations are established and authority released – and all of this is done in the dozen or so steps from the elevator to the problem. Her bosses are counting on her to get it done.

Most of the people I know aren’t looking for hard things. Most of us are looking for the easiest path to success. We want to lose weight. We know we should watch what we eat and hit the gym. Really? That’s hard. Isn’t there a pill we can take? We want to be closer to Christ and we know that would mean spending more time in Scripture study and prayer. I would love to do that, but March Madness has just started…

Most of us don’t realize the consequence of always pushing the easy button through life. You see, Jesus teaches us to trust Him in the hard places by walking us through hard places. It’s in the difficult moments of struggling with a text to extract the pearl of wisdom within it that helps us trust the validity of God’s words when life throws us a curve.

Here’s the problem. We live in a world where hard things are the only things left. All of the easy problems have been solved. All of the easy answers have been written in. All that’s left is hard. So, who can God trust in these hard moments? Who will God send? Who will be God’s “go-to guy”?

I played basketball most of my life. I was always good enough to make the team, but I was never good enough to play. In fact, it never crossed anyone’s mind that I should play. Every now and then, one of our stars would get into foul trouble or get hurt and the coach would have to put somebody in. I can remember him looking down the bench and seeing me.

I could see his face.

He was doing the math.

He was trying to decide if it would be better to play with four. A team has to start the game with 5, but they can play with only four players. My coach was thinking that it might be better for our team if he didn’t play me at all. He had seen me in practice. He didn’t trust me in the game. My coach needed a “go-to” guy. I wasn’t him.

Do you ever wonder what Jesus thinks when He looks down His bench and sees us? Would putting us in the game actually hurt the Kingdom of God? Is there anything in our lives that would cause God to hesitate in putting us in the game? Can God trust us with hard things?

The well known argument in apologetics is can we trust God to always work for our best? For me, that’s not the question. The real question is can God trust us?

Especially when it’s hard.

This essay was first posted in Scot McKnight’s newsletter.