Don't Give Up by Kyle Idleman
Don’t give up is about not giving up on people and God and how we lie to ourselves and usually those lies tell us to give up - give up the marriage, give up the dream, give up because God has abandoned you. God doesn’t care about you and he’s not with you and this book breaks down the lies the Devil tells us and counteracts lies just like that. The one story that stuck out to me in this book was the story of the woman whose husband cheated on her three times and she wanted a divorce, but she prayed and God told her to wait. Her husband, George, even left her and God still told her to wait. Can you believe that? He’s cheated and left and God’s asking her to wait for a guy that clearly wants nothing to do with her? God asked her “Do you trust me to bring you through this?”
And He did. They are still married to this day. That story touches me because a lot of people today tell people to leave a relationship, to divorce. If you’ve been on Reddit at all, you see it all over.
We believe lies all of the time from people that we trust and it can be disheartening and hard to trust. Most lies have some aspect of truth and the worst lies are the ones that we can keep deluding ourselves to - the father that won’t come back but we think he will, the boyfriend that we think still thinks about us when he’s moved on and he never actually cared, and some of these types of lies are harmless - you can’t eat 30 minutes before swimming, but imagine that on a much larger scale and you can see how it could be harmful.
Another thing that he talks about is a victim mentality and how so many of us can blame our circumstances but we don’t blame ourselves. We look in the mirror and we blame everything around us. We blame the mirror for how we look and for not being accurate and we blame people around us. We say things like “My boss is so unfair, I should’ve gotten that promotion.” Maybe you should’ve, but you didn’t. So what are you going to do about that? We can’t control other people, only ourselves. Some people have been damaged and have picked themselves back up, I’m saying never to be a victim, but you can and should be vulnerable to people you trust. Being vulnerable isn’t being a victim, it’s letting your guard down. We can’t give up because once we give up, that’s when we lose. We can fail over and over and over again and we can trust the wrong people over and over and over again, but once we give up, we lose any hope to make that right. We lose any hope to Win the Day. I want you to Win the Day and to make an amazing life for yourself so you can’t give up on others, but most importantly you can’t give up on yourself. Your circumstances may not be your fault, but they are your responsibility. Sometimes we are left in awful life situations and it might suck that it’s fallen to us, but it is our responsibility to help however we can. Trauma is not your fault, your life is not your fault, but they are your responsibility.
We always want to take the easy way out, we don’t want hardships in life but that’s not life and usually those hardships become harder when we ignore them. When we don’t go to the gym and eat junk food, later in life when we become sick because we didn’t take care of ourselves. Life is hard, but if you do the right things, it can at least be a little easier.
Don’t give up. You got this. Keep going and never give up.
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