When Praise Becomes Your Breakthrough

If they had such a thing in High School - I would have been voted “The Person Least Likely to Praise God in Adversity.” God takes the worst person to use as an example of His power to change. So if someone like me can change, it should give hope to others.

I was by nature, an analytical, melancholy person.

• I definitely saw the glass has “half empty” and if there was anything else wrong with that glass, I would find it.
• I always saw what was wrong with the world, people, and myself. Little things and big things could make me very sad.
• I couldn’t understand why God made a world with so many problems and allowed so many bad things to happen in the world. I would read the newspaper and cry for twenty to thirty minutes about all the murder, rape, war, etc. (not pray about those things, just cry about them).

In addition, life is sometimes difficult and I liked every thing to be easy. So you can imagine a melancholy person who wants an easy life isn’t going to be thrilled with adversity.

I was a Christian, but I was a sad one, and I just wanted to get through this life and get on to heaven, where things would be great.

• People would say to me “This is the day that the Lord has made. I will rejoice and be glad in it” and I would think “You’ve got to be kidding. Have you read the news?”
• And I even questioned God, “Have You read the news?”
• My life verses were the ones where the Old Testament prophets reached the ends of their rope, because I lived at the end of my rope.

1. Numbers 11:10 – Here Moses says to God “The burden is too heavy for me. If this is how you are going to treat me, put me to death right now.” Of course Moses said this leading millions of Israelites across the wilderness. I said it when I broke a fingernail.
2. 1 Kings 19:4 – Elijah “ I have had enough, Lord. Take my life.” Elijah had just killed 450 of Queen Jezebel’s false prophets and now the queen was trying to kill him. I on the other hand, couldn’t find a parking place.
3. And my personal favorite - Job 10:1 – Job “ I loathe my very life, therefore I will give free rein to my complaint and speak out in the bitterness of my soul.” This was my life verse.

My mom was out visiting and went to get a haircut. Now my mom and I are Texas girls and we like our hair big. Her hair was down to her shoulders, ratted high, and she just wanted a trim with a little layering. We went to a hairdresser who cut her hair short. Very short! And flattened it to her head.

My mom went from long, big hair to short, flat hair. Major adversity! DO NOT flatten a our big hair! She paid and left the beauty parlor very quickly. I was running after her and the Holy Spirit kept saying to me “Praise God”. So I praised God in a panic – “Praise God. Praise God. Praise God. Praise God.” I wouldn’t let myself think anything else as I ran after her to the car. And she went fast. You know how fast you can walk when your hair doesn’t look good.

Well, we got in the car and I said “Mom, we have to praise God for this.” Well, she looked long and hard at me and said “NO!” But I was convinced that was the right thing to do, so I just praised Him under my breath and didn’t mention it again to my mom. I had to take her right home where she ran upstairs and put on a scarf and said she was wearing a scarf for the next six months until her hair grew back. But I kept praising God and as I was praising, I saw a magazine I had with a cute cut, poofed on top with the ends flipped out. We styled my mom’s hair like that and it looked great! It was the cutest cut she had ever had. She loved it! And it never would have happened without the adversity!

Well, after that, just like a pendulum goes from one side to the other, I went from melancholy to annoyingly happy. I was off and running. I started praising God for everything. Everything! God lead me to books on praise by Merlin Carothers that expanded on what He was teaching me. My life started changing by leaps and bounds. So many great things kept happening to me that I had to keep a journal of all the miracles God was doing. I would write down the date and the adversity and then every day, I would praise God. When God worked it for good, I would go back and note how God had blessed me with the adversity. I still do this to this day.

Now nothing could make me sad or upset me for long, I would start praising God and things would improve. I have hundreds of examples, but for times sake I’ll just give a few examples:

I was so excited about praising God, I asked Him to show me more and to teach me more. He spoke to my spirit and said that some things are only learned in serious adversity. Was I willing to go through serious adversity to learn more? I couldn’t say yes, because I hate pain, but I couldn’t say no to God, so I said “God, you choose for me.” He spoke to my spirit and said “It will be intense, but brief.”

I worked for a computer company and I was in charge of testing areas of our product for the Y2K.

• One of the areas I was responsible for was Credit Card Authorization. On January 3 ^rd, we discovered a problem we had missed when I had the testing done. It affected 800 of our customers and caused their credit card transactions to be resubmitted for settlement each day of January.
• So if you bought a $10 item on January 1 from one of the people with our computer, you would see that $10 charge each day of the month. You would be charged 31 times for a single purchase. Oops. I mean, praise God.
• We were in a panic. Millions of dollars were at stake. President’s Clinton’s Y2K task force called this the worse Y2K problem in the financial industry.
• I heard they were hours away from closing down the credit card industry. We were fixing software and transmitting fixes to our customers around the clock.
• At this exact time, I came down with a flu thing. I had a fever of around 102 degrees. Every muscle and bone ached. I couldn’t think straight. I had bronchitis.
• I was working until 11:00pm at night and had to be back at the office at 5:00 am in the morning to call the credit card processors on the east coast. I was sleeping four hours a night.
• Our company was having to put aside hundreds of thousands of dollars for lawsuits. Words cannot express how badly I felt about that.

The climax of this adversity came on January 5 ^th at 2:30pm. I was in a meeting where we were discussing how to get through all this, and I started coughing and couldn’t quit. I had to excuse myself and go to the bathroom.

Now I was feeling so badly about the millions of dollars I had messed up, the problems I had caused for the company, our customers, the credit card processors, and I felt badly about the 102 degree fever and body aches.

Once I got to the bathroom, I just lost it. I sat there in the bathroom broke down crying. But I also knew that I had to praise God. So I praised Him for everything that was happening to me.

• I praised Him for the credit card problems.
• I praised Him for my fever.
• I praised Him with as much love and thanksgiving as I could muster up.
• I praised Him in faith that somehow, someway, this was working for my good according to Romans 8:28 which says “ And we know that all things work together for good for those that love God and are called according to His purpose”.

I praised Him even though I wasn’t enjoying myself, to say the least. Right there He spoke to my spirit and said “You just reached your breaking point. And everyone has one. Some people are weaker, some stronger, but everyone has a breaking point.” Then He spoke words that were music to my ears. He said “I’m going to get you through this.” 

From that point on, things began to improve.

• When I went back to the meeting, my manager told me to go home and get well. I went home and slept for 10 hours straight.
• The major credit card processors reversed the duplicated transactions,
• none of our customers sued us.
• My fever went away. I didn’t get fired.
• My personal favorite - I lost four pounds from my sickness! God gives His biggest blessings after the biggest adversity. Praise God!
• I think it’s good to get to the point where you can’t rely on yourself anymore. 

In 2019, my brother was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. He began working with his doctor to get it resolved. But something didn’t seem right.

At Christmas, he was supposed to go visit my mom for but didn’t because he broke his ribs in his sleep. What? That sounds strange. He had two large dogs that slept in his bed, so maybe?

He began losing lots of weight and was in constant pain. The middle of January, he checked into a hospital, and he didn’t have ulcerative colitis. He had Stage 4 colin cancer. And less than a week to live. Our family rushed to be near his side during his final days. I praised God with tears.

But God was with us. God provided in the most wonderful way.

• The doctors at the hospital mitigated the pain and kept him alive and coherent until we got there.
• He was a tennis pro and one of tennis partners came to the hospital made sure he was right with Christ before he passed.
• The hospital put us in a “hospice” room with a dining room and living room adjacent to his hospital bed so all of his visitors could be in the room. A tennis tournament (the Australian Open) was on the TV and all of his friends watched it with him.
• Two of his old girlfriends came to visit and began to argue over him in the hallway. 😊
• He was surrounded by love when he passed.
• His funeral was held at the end of January. It was attended by hundreds of people. I had no idea he had so many friends.
• Six weeks later the world shut down for covid. NO hospital visits were allowed, no large funerals. Had he died six weeks later, he would have died alone.
• Praise God we got to be with my brother when he passed.
• Praise God we were able to celebrate his life.
• Praise God he had accepted Christ.

After these kinds of experiences with my mom’s hair, the Y2K bug, my brother’s death and countless others, no one can complain to me but that I hit them over the head with a praise book and tell them to stop complaining and praise and thank God in the name of Jesus.

This annoys a lot of people, but ladies, try it. It works, even though it may not make sense to our minds. But does anything in the Christian faith make sense?

• The way up is down?
• The way to find your life is to lose it?
• Love your enemies?
• Be glad when your persecuted?

To me, praising God in adversity fits right in with everything else that I don’t understand. I’ve decided not to trust what I understand, but to trust what God says

Many of you may be dealing with adversity much more serious that what I have gone through.

• I had a friend I was telling about this and she said to me “Voni, I was raped and abused as a child. I can’t thank God for that.”
• Ladies, I can understand. I’ve never been through anything so devastating.
• Some of you may have serious illnesses your dealing with, the death of a loved one or the death of a marriage and you just can’t praise God.

I would recommend start wherever you can – start with the little things. I started with my mom’s bad haircut. God is faithful. He will be with you. He loves you. He’ll help you. He’ll grow you.

And one day you will find yourself in incredibly difficult circumstances, where everyone else is upset and perplexed, you will be calm and happy and giving praise, and everyone will think your crazy, but you’ll be happy and God will be getting praise. You attitude will be a testimony to God’s power. And God will work a miracle for you, just like He did for the Apostle Paul, just like He does for me. In my experience, He will either change the situation, or even better, He will change me, and sometimes He does both.

A few weeks later, the same friend called back and said “Voni, I can now praise God for everything that happened to me, even the rape. He was with me through every bad experience and He is going to use what happened to me to help someone else.”

Ladies, apply this principle and it will change your life. If you have a hard time, ask God to help you. It’s not easy, but it works. After the hair experience, my mom started praising God for everything and as she said “You just can’t stay mad, angry or upset when you’re praising God. It just changes you.” I would add, you can’t stay sad or discouraged when you’re praising God. It just makes you happy.

So now I feel like the happiest person in the world. My life is now working out so well. I used to feel like I was drowning in the problems of life, now I feel like I’m surfing on the waves that used to put me under and praising God is my surfboard.

But the best thing, the very best thing, is my love and trust in God has grown and grown each time He shows me that He can indeed work everything for good, no matter how bad it seems.

Our victory is in our praise and our God is faithful. My new life verses are:

1. Deut. 11:21 - He is your Praise; He is your God who performed for you those great and awesome wonders.
2. Ps.22:3 - But You are holy, You inhabit the praises of your people.
3. Ps. 89:15 - Blessed, happy, to be envied are those who have learned to acclaim you, who walk in the light of your presence.
4. 1 Cor. 4:17 Amp – Paul again writes – For our light, momentary affliction (this slight distress of the passing hour) is ever more and more abundantly preparing and producing and achieving for us an everlasting weight of glory – beyond all measure, excessively surpassing all comparisons and all calculations, a vast and transcendent glory and blessedness never to cease!

Praise God!