Keith Battle - Stuck

I want to talk about today, and my subject is «Stuck: What Do You Do When You Don’t Know What to Do?» I can tell you that not only is this lady in this situation, but one thing that 2020 has done to all of us, in one way or another, has left us stuck and confused. It’s as if we don’t know what to do in these situations. With all of the uncertainty in our world, all of the sadness, all of the sorrow, and all of the danger—along with the racial tension and social injustice—everything going on in our world makes us wonder, «What do we do with this?» The sudden deaths of young people and famous individuals, occurring unexpectedly, along with hate crimes and the tragic deaths of Black people in police custody—all this tension surrounds us. Then we have a worldwide pandemic that none of us has ever seen in the course of our lives, the worst in the last 100 years, where over 8.7 million people have been infected with the coronavirus and over 227,000 people have died. What are we supposed to do? How do we do church now? How do we work, with remote working and Zoom meetings while wearing pajama pants? How do we educate our kids? We, as faculty members, are faced with so much uncertainty.

One of the reasons this lady in the passage is stuck is that she’s not only dealing with one situation, but with multiple situations. She is not just dealing with the death of her husband; she is also facing the danger of losing her son due to debt. I want to share something about how God works: sometimes God gives us multiple situations to handle so that we don’t get stuck on one issue we can’t change. It’s really a blessing in disguise. I’m sure she felt overwhelmed, thinking, «Lord, this is just too much.» Some of you I am speaking to right now are dealing with multiple issues; you would be happy just to have one thing to wrestle with. You have one problem challenging you all day, and at night, another issue to research. What I want to emphasize is that sometimes God blesses us with multiple challenges so that we don’t focus on one thing that we can’t change.

If all she had to deal with was her husband’s death, she would have spent her days wishing he would come back. But because her son is at stake, she now has to fight for him. She doesn’t have time to dwell on her husband; she has a battle on her hands. Sometimes, God uses another problem to distract us from the one we can’t change. What I learned from this lady’s life, which is such a blessing in this situation, is that she implemented some strategies. I want to outline seven strategies that she used, which I would call stuck strategies: things we can employ when we don’t know what to do—when we don’t know which way to go or how to work our way out of a situation. You shouldn’t feel bad when you don’t know what to do; it just means you lack the resources or the means to handle what you are facing. Perhaps you’ve never faced this before, or maybe you’ve encountered something similar, but you have never experienced exactly this.

Here are the strategies I want us to examine from this lady’s life. The first one is right there in the first verse. She goes to Elijah and, one day, tells him, «My husband, who served you, is dead.» The first stuck strategy I want to give you is that she sought spiritual guidance. She went to the man of God. I think this is very important, y’all. Outside of praying, one of the most vital things you can do when you don’t know what to do is to seek someone who possesses wisdom—someone who can pray, whose character you can rely on. What are you going to watch? What are you going to read? Where are you going to go for counsel when you need it? I know in my own life I’m blessed—we’re all blessed—to have someone wise and godly in our lives. You need to have that because having someone wise to talk to—experienced and spiritual—can provide you with traction when you don’t know what to do. It’s such a blessing; solutions you wouldn’t even have thought of can leave you feeling like, «I can work with that.»

I want to ask you a question: who is in that circle in your life? Who can provide the wisdom you need when you’re stuck? This is very important. Albert Einstein once said that you cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it. See, with your own thinking and ability, you may get stuck in a problem, which is why you’ll need someone else to help you out of it. The scripture says there is safety in a multitude of counselors. Who do you need to reach out to? Sometimes, there are people I don’t even bother calling; I imagine myself in a room with them. I picture us talking, and I already know what they would say.