SRM Prayer Fellowship: Giving Up Is Not An Option

Preeti Priscilla

Electrical and Electronics Engineering, 2^nd year

SRM University

“Giving up is not an option.” I’ve heard these words many, many times and I’m pretty sure, so have you, but it is not until recently that I started to take these words to heart. You might ask, “What changed?” and that is precisely why I’m writing this-to tell you what changed.

You know that phase in your life when things are easy, you can sit around and relax, do the bare minimum and get through life easily? Well, I had all of that till my 10^th grade, everything came easily to me - marks, appreciation, attention. I never really gave it much thought nor did I consider as God’s favour and suddenly, in 11^th grade it all vanished. I was among new people and my marks went really low. Basically, it was a complete 180° shift from my earlier life. This is when my dry spell started. I developed low self-esteem, lost my interest in studies and lost whatever little interest I had in God but then, God never lost interest in me. Despite everything, He brought me to SRM University and my life changed again.

Here I realised that God’s love for me does not depend on what I do. He loves me just because He wants to, no ulterior motives. His love does not come with an asterix saying, “Terms and Conditions Apply”. His love is free flowing. It consumes everything - broken hearts, broken dreams, broken people - and makes them whole with no scars to show for the brokenness. Everything’s made new. Now you might think, “Yes, she got to know about God’s love and that changed her. Let’s get back to our work. Show’s over!” But, I’ll have to ask you to stop and read on.

Yes, God’s love is everything it said it is and so much more. Yes, it has the power to change everything. Yes, it makes everything new. But all this is possible only if you allow it. Now you might be wondering “Why would I not let God’s love make everything new? Why would I stop it?” Yes people. We do stop it. We stop it when we continue to hold on to our failures and let them define us. We stop it when we find our identity in the world and not in Jesus. We stop it when we let the fear of our future control our present. We stop it when we don’t trust Him completely. That is when all the doubts start to crop up, when everything seems to be crashing down, when we feel nothing good can come out of our lives and that is when we feel like GIVING UP!!

The human mind believes a lie so much more easily than it would the truth. If someone tells you that you don’t look very good or that you don’t sing very well, you immediately believe it and spend the rest of your life, trying to match upto that person’s standards. We choose to ignore or should I say we choose to forfeit God’s glory upon our lives. God has been shouting, “You are beautiful and amazing! I have created you in My image.” Do we believe this most of the time? Nope. We consider the words of a human superior to the promises of our Almighty God. We fall right into the devil’s well laid trap.

The devil’s sole aim is to bring us down to a position where God cannot use us. So, we need to decide who defines our identity - Jesus or the world. If Jesus is our identity then what do we need be afraid of? We can declare just like Paul did-If God is for us then who can stand against us? We need to stop letting our failures or our past define us. We need to BELIEVE that we are made new in Christ. I’m not saying that this battle is easy or short. It’s a long battle that we will be fighting till the day Jesus comes back but are we alone in this battle? Absolutely not! Jesus is here. We might not see him or feel Him at times but He is always there, watching, ready to pull us out when we can’t take it anymore. He’ll never give us more than we can handle.