Psalm 18.35 promises, You give me Your protective shield; Your right hand supports me; Your willingness to help enables me to prevail.

Some people call God a crutch. A manufactured belief for weak people. I agree. I need a crutch and I am weak. But God isn’t manufactured by me nor the billions who also seek Him.

Islam has no use for a weak believer. Their god wants strong people who work hard at pleasing him. Like strapping bombs to themselves and sacrificing their lives to kill the infidel including innocent women and children. Seriously, what kind of a god is that? All gods are not the same because there is only one true God and He is not the god of the Muslims.

The One True God has intersected my life so many times I cannot count them all and most likely more than I even realize. I do cry out to Him on a regular basis for help. I don’t always get what I want but I get what I need including getting over the current malady for which I am most desperately praying. Usually these things fall into one of three categories.

I make many relationally bad decisions, hurting those I love the most. I pray for restoration and change so that I become increasingly less of a problem and more of a blessing. This is my oldest prayer and I continue to pray it. I pray this way because I still need to change but God has and is answering this prayer through a family that continues to love me despite myself.

I often pray for help financially. My financial issues are almost all the result of stupidness or laziness. I have made many bad financial decisions and I am not willing to do all that I could to be as wealthy as I could were I to work differently. Thus I need help. Again, God has blessed my feeble work efforts. God has helped me overcome my bad decisions. Sometimes this means making longer and higher payments but I haven’t lost everything nor gone to jail for being financially stupid. God has been a great help.

Finally, I pray for health for myself, my family and my friends. Like everyone, we have faced our scary health moments. We have lost loved ones to cancer. All of God’s help hasn’t been God doing all I want or asked of Him. His ways are wiser and better. He has healed many of my friends. He has healed most of my family prayers. He has always comforted me when He choose a different answer than the one I requested.

The promise David received in today’s verse is the ability to prevail because God is His help. The older we get the more clear it is that this life is about prevailing as much as anything else. Life is hard because everything physically and spiritually is in rebellion against God Who is good.

Until He returns to live among us as King on the new world He will create for all those who have loved Him, He will continue to be a help to all who seek Him in humility so that they can prevail in their efforts to serve Him in this world so that others can come to know and love Him too.