How To Fight To Win!
- Details
- Category: Religion
- Published: Tuesday, 30 July 2013 03:40
The darkness had about overwhelmed me when I saw a ray of light.
It happened during my tenure as president of the Osceola Branch of the NAACP & President of SCLC, and during a city commission meeting in 1991. After a long evening with city commissioners, the presidents of Lynx and the Orlando Chamber of Commerce I reached an agreement. They had decided to call off all the dogs and strike a deal to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a paid holiday for the city of Kissimmee and to fund public transportation. The County of Osceola and the city of St. Cloud also followed suit.
I’m a fighter—The cities and the county needed to make the right decision on these two items to bring the change necessary to move us forward into the twenty first century. The make-up of the cities and the county was changing and we needed to keep in step for the future growth and expansion.
I hate to admit it, but I was right. The fight being waged against me and my two colleagues to make these two items law was crushing my family, our church, and me. The loyalty of some of the church and other two organizations members was wobbling as people were grumbling. It was turning into a mess.
And so facing one of the greatest challenges in my, I cried out to God for His counsel and a peace of mind. After several hours of painful deliberation all the parties decided to make a deal. All the opposition against making these two items law was stopped and they were approved. I had my life back, but at what cost?
I went home feeling more defeated and discouraged, more dead on the inside than I had ever felt. I had always believed in the best in people, but I left that meeting not so sure about people anymore. I felt like everybody was a Judas. I had given my heart and poured my passion into this project and into so many people for so long. Now, the way I felt, I wanted to say, “If that’s what you get at the end of giving your life away, I want to keep my life to myself!”
I was a broken man. And since I was so isolated and without mentors and close friends, I had to claw my way through the darkness and pain by myself to try to find a reason to go on and make sense of all the tragedy.
The weight of it all really fell on me after the approval. With the day-to-day battle over, I now had some time to reflect on how much it had damaged me, my wife, my kids, the church, everything.
I had never felt such disillusionment with ministry and community service in my life. How would I respond? I knew I would have to drill down very deep spiritually to find the strength to go on.
And this was not the end of the pain. Shortly thereafter some key personnel at the church resigned, leaving holes in the ministry. Some others on the volunteer staff—people who were precious to me—left and sought to start another church.
However, this is when my understanding was birthed of why God had allowed these things to happen. In my personal time alone with God, crying out to Him for comfort and understanding, I began to see things in the Bible that I had overlooked before. In case after case I found out that:
The viciousness of a battle is a clue to the greatness of the coming breakthrough.
A great enemy signals a great triumph.
Dwelling on these concepts, which I discovered throughout the Word of God, began to give me the hope to see that maybe, just maybe, these great enemies that I had faced had set me up for the biggest things that could ever happen in my life. In this period of darkness I ran into the arms of God, soaked myself in the Word, and discovered “The Necessity of An Enemy.”
I saw that there was a plan and reasons after all. To fight to win keep your “faith in God and His plan.”
Keep Believing Dr. “V”
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