Beginning a new school year brings memories of sore muscle. My summers were spent at the lake with my family, where I used my swimming, tree climbing and rock clambering muscles, but apparently none of the muscles required for gym class. The first week back was always painful. The first 50 sit ups, jumping jacks and squats of the school year—do you remember how that felt? We’d agonize through the exercises, ecstatic we made it through, and the next morning we were very thoughtful getting out of bed. Maybe that pain is no longer part of our education system, but do kids feel like this at the beginning of a new sport? To build up endurance, coach has you run around the field ten times. You’re positive you won’t make it, but when you do—! You’re so proud that you accomplished it that you don’t really mind your stiffness for the next day or two.

This is something like today’s psalm. I remember when I first noticed this psalm. My son had gotten a Living Bible from my cousin for being ring bearer in her wedding. Matthew carried the Bible with him to church—I think because it had good pictures, and they gave him something to do during the sermons. During the week, he’d let me read it, which delighted me, because it was so much easier than my old King James, I actually read it. When I found Psalm 91, I loved its reassurance. Here I was, trying to figure out what being a Christian was about, and it was telling me it was about God’s protection and safety. I was so grateful for this insight that I slipped Psalm 91 into every conversation, until one of my friends pointed out a subtle little point I hadn’t noticed.

The psalm didn’t say I was exempt from troubles. The poisonous snakes and lions were still around. Stones were still trip hazards. It was just that now (since I was living in the shelter of God) now I would not be devastated by disaster. It’s not that troubles don’t come—they do. We’re saved, but with a limp. Like getting more fit by exercising, but feeling sore at first. Like my son paddling the length of the Mississippi, but leaner and tougher than ever. Like finding, when my washing machine sprang a leak, that I could fix it, but not until I had learned a thing or two about what I could lift. We come through troubles all right, but sometimes we have scars to prove it. God rescues, but God also doesn’t suspend cause and effect. God, who never wastes anything, allows our battles, our failures, our challenges, to be part of our redemption. These tough times can turn us to God, if we will only let them. New orientation. My mother grew up during the Great Depression. Her father was a bricklayer, and work was so hard to come by that you went wherever could to get it. Consequently, my mother attended eight grade schools before she was 10. That would have been a challenge for any little girl, but my mother had eczema on her hands. People didn’t know much about allergies then, and besides, this was an itinerant girl, so maybe her family had cleanliness problems not to mention some communicable disease. Don’t touch her. Even as a grown up, my mother hurt when she told of teacher after teacher saying to the class, “Line up by twos and hold your partner’s hand, but don’t touch Bernice.” As an adult, my mother had highly sensitive antennae for the person left out. She was the first and best supporter for anyone on the margins. Maybe that’s why she started a Girl Scout troop for handicapped kids, adapting the curriculum so severely limited kids could succeed. Maybe that’s why she earned her special ed teaching degree at 50. She survived those hurts from her childhood. She was saved, but with a limp. And that limp, so much a part of who she was, was her gift to a generation of children, and something she passed on to her daughter and her granddaughters. These so-called limps from surviving life’s battles are so much a part of human experience that we have a saying for it—“Once bit, twice shy.” But the proverb doesn’t indicate whether the bite is negative or positive. That’s up to us. My mother’s limp, the result of her childhood pain, became positive when she used it to help others, but she could just as easily have become bitter or withdrawn or angry. Sometimes people experience “once bit, twice shy” and decide, “I tried it once, I’ll never do it again.” No more risk taking, no more danger, just hide under the bed. The limp becomes a handicap.

It doesn’t have to be that way. How we use our limp is up to us. We can use it negatively—to shut down, hole up away from risk—or we can use it positively, to be better prepared ourselves, to help others. Like the student who does poorly giving a book report in front of the class deciding to become “class clown” accepting the “dummy” label, rather than using the experience positively to learn how to do better. Like a family cramped in tiny apartments for years, when they finally get to buy a house, choosing a house based on size alone. Or like people who have scrimped for years, suddenly winning the lottery and spending it all on themselves until they are bankrupt.

Limps don’t just come from surviving trauma. I used to think of summer as “canning season,” because that’s all I did, filling every spare minute with harvesting, canning, freezing. My friends and I had limited budgets and growing kids. We had to be obsessed in the summer to feed them all winter, but I was so proud I could do it. I’ve been saved from that now, but I’ve still got a limp. Although I no longer garden, I find myself at the farmer’s market stocking up. For what? There are only two of us, and I don’t have time to can or freeze. This limp isn’t a handicap, just a funny urge I need to resist, but which I can use positively for the Resource Center and their clients.

Any limp—the marks left on us through surviving some struggle—can be used for the good of others. Everyone has trials, times of hardship and struggle. What we do with those experiences can make us bitter or angry or withdrawn or they can make us more effective in our ministries to and with each other. If we choose. If we resist the urge to withdraw or strike out because of the experience. If we choose to let God use the experience for our redemption.

Psalm 91 is a psalm of new orientation. The writer has come through hard times with a sense of God’s gracious intervention. Unless we gain new orientation in our struggles, we’ll be stuck in disorientation. The idea of letting God use our struggles to reorient us is so much a part of the life of Christian discipleship that someone wrote a book about it. Henri Nouwen wrote The Wounded Healer, about surviving heartbreak and challenge and struggle to then help others. An abused woman gets out and finds a ministry helping other abused persons—because she hears the abuse that people can’t admit, because her sympathy has integrity. A cancer survivor gives practical advice and offers hope to others battling the disease. Parents of adolescent twins mentor new twin parents with more credibility than parents of only children. A recovering alcoholic points active alcoholics to recovery because he recognizes the lies and denial. When one experiences grace, knows that it is grace itself that brings one through, gratitude can only make one generous toward others. Helping others gives meaning to the hard times, and sometimes the hope of someday being able to help others is what makes it possible to make it through. During the bleak years of my life, my pastor knew he could get me up and back out into the struggle by saying, “It will make you a better deacon.” I hope it has made me a better pastor.

Saved, but with a limp. In tempting Jesus, the devil quotes Psalm 91 with God’s promises of angelic protection. It is ironic that Jesus’ temptations become the hallmarks of his ministry. Turn stones to bread? Feeding thousands with a few bread and fish. Rule all the kingdoms? Messiah, not just of Israel, but of the kingdom of God. Protected by angels? Killed, but resurrected. Jesus survives the devil’s temptations to face them again and again throughout his ministry. Saved, but with a limp. His limp is to embrace the temptations without focusing them on himself. His limp is to embrace them for the glory of the One who sent him, for the sake of the coming kingdom of God. We are saved, friends, but it is up to us what we do with the limp.