The Lord is gracious and righteous;
our God is compassionate.
The Lord guards the inexperienced;
I was helpless, and he saved me.
Return to your rest, my soul,
for the Lord has been good to you (Psalm 116:5-7).

Have you ever been truly desperate? Perhaps you have. Perhaps you have more than once. Perhaps you know what it’s like to be genuinely hungry with no way to get food. Or genuinely in danger with no hope of rescue. Or genuinely impoverished with no prospects for the future. I confess, I have not. Or at least not very often.

There have been low times, difficult times, sad times – but desperate times? Extreme times? Those have, by God’s grace, been few and far between. But there is a certain irony in that. For the reality is that all of us have experienced desperate times; in fact, all of us are in desperate times. We just don’t recognize they are happening.

Think of it like this – a baby has very little self-consciousness. All she knows is that she’s hungry, or thirsty, or tired, or dirty. And a baby only sort of knows those things at all. She is completely oblivious to the rest of the world around her. Her parents might be struggling to survive financially. One or both of them might be badly sick. The house might be on fire, for crying out loud. In any of these situations, the baby is in a desperate circumstance – she just doesn’t know she is.

This same dynamic is at play all the time in our own lives. We are all breathing our next breath because God wills it to be so. The earth is spinning on its axis only because Jesus is holding all things together. We are in the faith because God is powerfully holding us there in His love. So we are, actually, always in desperate times – but because God is a good Father, we are not even cognizant of how desperate those times are.

But there are moments in all our lives in which our carefully nurtured reality is shattered. We are reminded of how frail, how weak, how powerless we are. It might be a car wreck, a diagnosis, a sudden turn in the economy, or perhaps even something like a worldwide pandemic that reminds us of the precarious situation in which we find ourselves. In those times – in those extreme times – we are reminded of what’s always been true. That we are desperately in need. We suddenly become cognizant of what has always existed in the background, the dramatic nature of our own helplessness.

For the Christian, there are really two ways we can react when our desperation bubbles to the surface. We can either panic, or we can trust. In our panic, we might resort to self-reliance, to avoidance, to self-harm, or to escape. And each of those things can be exercised in any number of ways. But the way of faith? What does that look like in the day of desperation?

John Flavel once said, “Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.”

During the day of extremity, there is an opportunity for God to do what He does. To deliver. To save. To bring good our of bad and order out of chaos.

Now to be clear, God is not limited by our extremity. That is to say, God doesn’t only work when the situation is extreme. But when the situation is extreme, it is an opportunity for us to reaffirm our faith and to have an active kind of trust – the kind of trust that takes real work – rather than a passive and assumed kind of trust. And this is where we live most often.

Our faith exists in the realm of assumption. We assume the sun will come up. We assume we will not have a catastrophic accident. We assume that everything will be okay today just as it was yesterday. That’s not all bad – again, our ability to make such assumptions is a reflection on both God’s common and special grace in our lives. But every once in a while, it is a very good thing for us to be put in a situation that’s a little more extreme.

Perhaps, though, rather than waiting for that extreme situation to come to us, we can take an active approach here as well. Perhaps we can remind ourselves of how good God is to us on a daily basis and just how extreme our situation would be without Him. Perhaps the kind of extremity which is God’s opportunity is something we can actually live in for His glory.

Perhaps. And perhaps faith, like a muscle, can be built.