Devotional.
Every spring and early summer, I get hit with terrible hayfever (that's what us Brits call a pollen allergy).
When I say terrible, I mean absolutely awful. When it's bad, I'll sneeze around 500 times in a day.
And I try to push through it.
Keep working, keep going, sneezing constantly, but determined to function anyway.
After about the 200th sneeze, I tend to give up and get into bed. For my own good, and for everyone around me.
I don't just have this stubbornness with hayfever. I do the same thing with most of my life.
I keep trying to stand through everything. Pushing through, bearing up, managing it all. Determined to stay strong, to handle it, to keep going no matter what. And I don't stop until I absolutely can't stand anymore.
But what if I stopped sooner? What if I recognized earlier that I need to kneel?
When I'm standing, I'm carrying the weight on my own shoulders. When I kneel in prayer, the burden shifts from my strength to God's.
From my limited capacity to His unlimited power. From what I can handle to what He can handle.
Kneeling is both worship and desperation. It's acknowledging He's God and I'm not. It's recognizing He's my Maker and I need Him.
It's bringing my burdens to the One who can actually bear them while also bowing in reverence to the One who deserves it.
Prayer shouldn't be my last resort when everything else fails. It should be my first response. But I get it backwards. I try to manage, problem-solve, push through. And only when I'm completely depleted do I finally kneel.
What if I knelt sooner? What if I stopped trying to prove I'm strong enough and instead humbled myself, letting God carry what's crushing me?
Today, if you're pushing through when you should be kneeling, stop. Bring it to prayer. Let the burden shift. You were never meant to carry it all alone.
Prayer.
Lord, when life gets too hard to stand, help me remember to kneel, to drop to my knees in prayer when the weight becomes too much to bear upright.
I keep trying to stand through everything, pushing through, bearing up under pressure, when the answer was always to kneel before You, to bring it all to prayer.
Teach me that kneeling isn't defeat but wisdom, not weakness but strength, that sometimes the bravest thing I can do is stop trying to stand and instead bow before You.
When I can't stand under the weight anymore, kneeling shifts the burden from my shoulders to Yours, from my strength to Yours, from my limited capacity to Your unlimited power.
Help me recognize when I need to stop standing and start kneeling, when circumstances have become too much for me to handle alone and prayer is the only way forward.
Remind me that prayer isn't my last resort when everything else fails but should be my first response, that kneeling in surrender gives me access to strength standing never could.
Give me humility to kneel when I need to, to admit I can't stand through this alone, to bow before You and let You carry what's crushing me.
Let me remember today that when life gets too hard to stand, I can kneel, and in that posture of prayer I'll find the strength I couldn't find trying to stand alone.
In Jesus' name,
Amen.
