Your Hardest Season Might Be Your Assignment

We wrestle with why battles keep showing up and why life can feel like a constant climb. We share the message God gave us about staying alive through struggle and learning to hover over chaos until something new is formed. 
• praising God in up seasons and praying in trouble through James 5:13 
• facing repeated challenges and asking if life will ever flow 
• hearing God say struggles keep you alive and redefining what it means to live 
• seeing Genesis 1:2 as God’s posture over emptiness darkness and fear 
• treating problems as part of our assignment rather than random pain 
• learning from Jesus’ mission in Luke 4 to heal release and restore 
• watching Jesus free the woman caught in adultery from shame and captivity 
• understanding Jeremiah’s call to uproot tear down build and plant 
• choosing to move first like the Holy Spirit and refusing to sink under anxiety 
If this episode has touched you in any way, remember to share it with anyone and anybody who needs it.

Transcript

Welcome And Life’s Up Seasons

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hello everybody. Welcome to the Light of Life podcast. I'm your host, Rutendo. Thank you so much for joining me today. I pray that I find you in good health and in good spirits, even as your soul prospers. If you are going through what we call up moments, you know, if things are going well for you, as you all know, life has ups and downs. But right now, if you're in your up moment, I just want to join you in praising the Lord and thanking him on your behalf. If there's a testimony, a breakthrough that you have in your life, if the Lord has been good to you and you have just seen it. In fact, let me say, the Lord has been good to you. The fact that you're here listening, I want to join in praising him and thanking him on your behalf. James 5 13 says, Is any among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise, which is essentially a prescription for how you are to handle your up and down seasons. Now there's a statement that people usually say. I don't know if you've come across it, if you've heard it. They say that when the highs are high, the lows are low. And I know it was really made popular in the mental health space to describe like emotional fluctuations, you know, like excitement, then depression, you know, those extremes. But it was also taken to mean that when good moments are good, bad moments are also really bad. Now, I'm not going to discuss the validity or how true that statement is, but okay, let me just share something with you.

When Old Battles Return

SPEAKER_01 2:23

Some months ago, a couple of months ago, I was talking to God, praying, and I was asking him some questions. Last year, I think I had been put on a number of just different medications, and the main side effect of these class of medications is weight gain. Weight gain. And I have had to start the annoying process of trying to watch and maintain and even lose a little bit of weight. There was a moment when I was speaking to the Lord with kind of a mixture. I pray about everything, any and everything that I think in that moment, I'm thinking, I'm centering myself, I'm hearing and talking to the God in me. And in that moment, of course, it was just a time of honesty, but I was just exhausted. Okay. I had a baby four years ago. I had finally reached my goal weight, that I had been recommended by my doctor, and I was okay in that area. And I remember just saying, Lord, I thought I had overcome this. Why does it feel like I'm facing this thing again? And at the same time, I had just overcome in another area of my life, like huge wins in things that I had been praying for. And I was just thinking, like, okay, just when I felt like I have crossed one mountain, climbed up, and I'm now on my way down, and I'm on this amazing plain, a grassy plain, and I'm about to rest. Another hill is appearing in front of me. And in that moment of weariness, I won't lie to you, I felt weary. I asked him, Will there ever be a season where life just simply flows? You know, a place where I can just breathe and enjoy the journey and not feel like I'm constantly fighting another battle again and again. And while I was doing the dramatic thing, you know, women sometimes we like doing that. And I was pouring myself more like complaining, if I'm honest. Something shifted. You know, I I can't even pinpoint the exact sentence that triggered or opened that door to begin that encounter, that communication. But suddenly it's like the floodgates of the communications just opened. And I probably it was my heart that became more sensitive to his voice and my ear, and I was just in a more sensitive state. And then I heard him say something that stopped me quite literally in my tracks.

Struggles Keep You Alive

SPEAKER_01 5:46

He said, struggles are there to keep you alive. And immediately I became quiet, quiet as far as my thoughts and you know, racing of my mind and everything that was going on before. I stopped speaking. And the more I stopped, the more he began to just unfold different thoughts in me. And what he began to show me, it left me just in awe. In awe of him, in awe of life, in awe of purpose, just in awe. That's the best way that I can describe it. At first, that statement sounds very strange. Battles, like, what do you mean battles keep me alive? Like, I was trying to get more and trying to understand. And you know, there's a line in um, this is just me uh, you know, taking a little detour before we get back to our subject. But you know, there's a line in Michael Jackson's song, Heal the World, and he says, stop existing and start living. It's such a deep and pregnant statement to say. And I want you to know today that there is a difference between merely existing and being alive. Like someone in a coma, they are existing. If they have money in their bank account, they still have money in the bank account, they're still considered very much in existence, but they're not really living their life. And as a living soul, as a spirit sent from heaven, having human experiences, you are never designed just to exist. You were designed and sent and commissioned to experience life in its fullness. And that raises, at least for me, it raised an important question, which I posed back to him. And I said, So, what does it actually mean to be alive? That's when he really began to just download, like it was a like I said, a flood of information that just came. I was writing it down as he was saying it. Have you ever heard of billionaires who take their lives or even wealthy people who start pursuing very weird and even like eccentric hobbies of sorts? Why? Because they have solved probably a majority of the material issues in their lives: hunger, you know, poverty. They don't worry about, you know, what am I gonna eat tomorrow? Where am I gonna eat tomorrow? What am I going to wear? They have access to the best doctors. So their health is okay. They have access to the best food, organic food free from pesticides, and they can have a chef to prepare the healthiest meals, and they can even have the designers to come and measure them and tailor-made clothes for them and build their houses from scratch. Now they're trying to build houses on Mars and stuff. Why? Because they've almost like run out of things to solve, and they feel in order for them to feel like I'm still alive, they start trying to look for problems to solve.

Genesis Shows God Hovering Over Chaos

SPEAKER_01 10:02

And then I saw Genesis 1 verse 2 that image of God's spirit, the Holy Spirit hovering over the face of the deep. That's Genesis 1, verse 2. The scripture says, Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. That's a problem, right? It's like when you see, let me give an example, your business idea. You're seeing something formless. You just have a light bulb, a light spark that still needs a lot of cultivating, a lot of logs, a lot of firewood for it to turn into maybe a fully fueled flame. That's why I have so much respect for people who are able to work on an idea from scratch, okay, and see it through to its maturity. It's it takes a lot of work. There's a lot that goes into that to conceptualize something and to actually drag it from the invisible to the visible. So the scripture goes on to say that there was emptiness, yet it was not too empty to make him leave. He still hovered on top of the deep. Yet the Lord Himself, when he saw emptiness, he hovered over it. He lingered. Now, the worst and terrifying thing here for me, it says there was darkness over the surface of the deep. I don't know if if you've ever, it's terrifying to me. Like I'm already afraid of the water. But think of an ocean. I know this was before oceans were created and everything, but I'm saying just think of the darkness that they say is there at the center of the ocean. It's one thing to be in the dark on dry land, but imagine being in the dark on top of the deepest parts of the water in a formless place. Imagine that. And it still wasn't enough to make him move away. He did the opposite. He hovered, he lingered. And I know you're thinking my situation is not only dark in the sense of it being bleak and hopeless, but it is terrifying. It may be a disease. And I'm not talking about having the sniffles maybe for two or three days. I mean terrifying dark sickness, illness. Yet the spirit of the Lord still hovers over those types of situations. He hovered over existing chaos. Chaos, that was the state that the world was in at that time, the earth was in. Can you imagine that? I want you to understand that this means that the way that our Lord, our maker, views problems and challenges is completely different than the way we view it when we're going through things. Exercising your problem-solving abilities is how you show that there is life in you. That's what he was telling me. And it's how you show that you can also distribute that life that you carry to your surroundings. So when I saw that picture of him, I wasn't just taken to the text, but I literally saw that picture of him hovering over the face of the water. It was more of like the sense that I got, more like anticipation. Instead of him being depressed or him feeling overwhelmed, he had that excitement when he saw the formless, dark and shapeless earth. Now, have you ever watched these uh channels like HGTV or you know, those people uh who are renovating houses? Like they buy and they flip homes. Some of them buy houses that are like in foreclosure, and they even take up projects of houses that have been uninhabited for years. But for them, seeing that dust, the cobwebs, the dilapidated structures and falling ceilings, those things that scared the previous owners to move away are the same conditions of turmoil that invited those new owners because they have a different perspective when it comes to challenges. They are like excited when they see a house that is like dilapidated, and they say, No, I want to break this down and put a brick wall here, and maybe an accent wall here, and we're gonna put a chandelier here, and we're gonna do this. And you look at the place and you're like, This dump, you're interested in this? Why not just tear it down and build a new house? And they say, No. It excites them, it brings them life and energy when they get to solve a problem.

Challenges As Part Of Your Assignment

SPEAKER_01 16:34

As the Lord continued speaking to me, it really dawned on me that our lives on earth are not random at all. We were sent here with assignments, just in case you didn't know. And those assignments are not what you think. Because a lot of times when you think of an assignment, you think of, you know, my mandate, you know, what God sent me to do, winning souls and, you know, saving lives and things like that. But why not look at the challenges in your life as part of your assignment? We are here to repair what is broken, to shape some things that are even unfinished, to cleanse things that have been corrupted. We are here to repair what is broken in whatever sphere that we're placed in. And even now, as I sit here, I'm just thinking of the messianic announcement, how Jesus announced himself, and this is Luke chapter 4, verse 16 to 21. When Jesus stood in the synagogue and he read from the scroll of Isaiah, and he said, The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me. And listen to what he said is his assignment. He said, He has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, he has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim the freedom for the captives, and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Healing Broken Hearts Takes Weight

SPEAKER_01 18:36

I want you to let that sit for a moment and think maybe for about just one of those assignments that he spoke of. Healing the brokenhearted. Do you know what goes into healing a broken heart? For anyone who has ever had their heart broken, I know you understand that this is not a small matter at all. I mean, when your heart is broken, it feels as though your entire world is just falling on top of you. It's collapsing, and you're just under the rubble, you know. I've experienced it. Lord knows I have experienced it. You wake up in the morning, and before your eyes even open, before you even become aware that, you know, the sun has risen and the birds are singing, and it's a beautiful day. The first thing your mind registers is the pain. Your emotions remind you almost immediately that my heart is broken. You remember all the things that you hoped for, what you expected, what you built your life around, and you just feel hopeless. Maybe you lost someone you loved deeply. I told you the story of how I lost my brother. Maybe you trusted in something that suddenly collapsed. Maybe your business collapsed, maybe your job, you were laid off so suddenly. And in that moment, you think to yourself, I know I thought this. I just said, Lord, I wish there was a pill that I could just take that could simply erase this just this horrible feeling. Yet Jesus stood there and he said, I have been sent to heal that. That alone tells you the weight of his assignment. Ladies and gentlemen, healing a broken heart is not a light task. And I know if you've experienced it, you know that it never, it will never happen overnight. It requires patience, compassion, presence, power. It requires someone who can sit with pain long enough for restoration to begin. But notice something about the way Jesus approached people. When he encountered someone who carried pain and wounds and what people today might call baggage, you know, it has such a negative, negative connotation to it. You've got baggage. He never shrunk back. He didn't see it as a problem and think, here's something to avoid. Like, you know, they got a lot of baggage, you know, I don't want to deal with them. He welcomed that baggage that we all run away from. He saw those wounded places in people and recognized his assignment in their wounds. My God, thank you, Jesus. How do you look at a damaged person with mental instability? Have you ever dealt with someone who is really mentally and emotionally unstable to a point where they're happy one second and the next minute they're depressed, and the other minute they just want to yell and throw things in the other minute? I personally avoid people like that. But Jesus, when he saw someone like that, he said, There you go. That's my assignment right there. He didn't see it as a problem. He hovered around people like that. Whenever he saw someone carrying deep emotional pain, he saw a place where that healing could begin. When he saw captives, whether physically or spiritually bound, he recognized, like, okay, these are chains right there. That's my assignment. They need to be broken. You know that there are people today who are imprisoned in ways that are not visible even to the physical eye. Some people are trapped in all sorts of addictions. People are battling various mental struggles, physical struggles that feel like invisible chains. Other people are bound by habits and patterns that they can never seem to escape. These are some of the most difficult captivities, just in case you didn't know. It's so difficult to break a chain that you cannot see. Yet when Jesus encountered people in those conditions, he did not recoil. Think about the woman caught in adultery. Just think of that if it were today. No one would want to be seen with such a person. In fact, it was even more scandalous back in that day because they wanted to stone her. Many people. They saw someone shameful, someone who needed to be condemned, as the law said, put to death. But Jesus, I love Jesus, just in case you didn't know. I love me some Jesus. He saw something different. He saw a woman who was captive, and he saw someone bound by something deeper than the act itself that she had committed. He saw beyond that. And where others saw just the disgrace of a woman, he said, No, that's my assignment right there. I'm not going to run away. I'm going to hover over the face of this deep, dark situation until I bring out something beautiful out of it. I'm going to linger around long enough until I can call light out of her darkness. I was sent to break this type of captivity. That's my assignment.

Jesus Breaks Shame And Hidden Chains

SPEAKER_01 25:33

So he spoke with her with authority and compassion. If you read the scripture, he asked her, he said, Woman, where are your accusers now? And when they had gone, he said, Neither do I condemn you. And I love this part, and I feel like it's really misinterpreted, or maybe it's just another different way of looking at it. He said, Go and sin no more. And of course, at surface level, it's him giving her advice and saying, go and sin no more. But I think that's for the Sunday school people. The real power in those words, if you look at them, they were not merely just a reprimand. They carried a tone of liberation. He said, go. Like if I'm holding a bird and I say, go, he's saying, go and sin no more. He's telling her, go. You are free to go and live a life without sin. That's what he's telling her. Liberating her. In essence, what he was saying, he's breaking the good news to her that you are released. You're no longer bound by this scarlet letter of being the town prostitute. Go forward. You're free. You can live a life as if you never had that past. You know, in Bible school, they teach you about what they call, I hate getting into these technical terms, partial realized eschatology or realized salvation, where there are people who are able to experience salvation even before it was possible. There were few individuals that were able to experience the new life of a believer, even before the death of Christ. And she is one of them, I believe it, because he said, Go and sin no more. You can never sin anymore. After now, I have released you from that captivity of sin. So it's similar to telling someone, for example, go and eat, not as a command of like pressure, but I'm giving you permission. Now go on, go and eat. You're free to do it now. And Jesus is saying, you're free to live a life free of sin now. The restriction is gone. If you look at the calling of the prophet Jeremiah, you will understand more that the situations and the struggles that you are facing right now, the things that you're praying about for God to break and and and you want him to give you a way through. And if you look at it more like this is my assignment, trust me, it'll be easier. Just like when he spoke to me, I don't really struggle anymore with, oh my God, I gotta lose so much. Oh my God, I gotta face this challenge again. I hear his voice every time I want to complain, he says, You're keeping, you're staying alive. You're staying alive. I'm bringing you back now to the story of the prophet Jeremiah. When God called him, he told him something very striking. He said that Jeremiah had been appointed to uproot and to tear down. Do you know what it takes to do such an assignment? If you look at the prophetic career of Jeremiah, you will understand that this was not a light assignment. He faced issue after issue after issue. He was appointed to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant. Now, if you've ever built anything in your life, whether it's a house, a chicken coop, whatever it is, you know that building is something that takes commitment, it takes consistency, it takes focus, it takes single-mindedness, resources. And planting, I'm coming, I'm an African, and I'm very familiar with the cycle of planting something. Let's say a maize crop. We plant maize probably what early, mid, late, some, late October. As soon as the rains are supposed to come, people are already planting. First, you have to prepare the land, you have to buy the seed, you have to buy fertilizers, you have to buy all these things just in preparation for planting. These are not light tasks. And anyone who has been in a cycle of planting maize, you know that sometimes you can plant your crop and then you get there when other plants are starting to now bud and shoot. You find that certain places that you have planted, the seeds didn't take. So you now need to go back in and plant again so that the new seeds that you plant can grow and try to catch up to the others. It's a complicated process. You have to deal with weeds, you have to deal with pests, the protecting of the crop, fertilizing and tending to the soil. Planting is work. Uprooting is even harder, trust me. Imagine trying to uproot a tree that has roots that have gone so deep, like an oak tree that has been there for 30 years. Think about something like that. Without the right tools, you can never, it can be exhausting.

Jeremiah Shows Hard Callings

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So when the Lord said to me, struggles are there to keep you alive, I really began to look at my own struggles that I called struggles, and I saw what he meant. They're not just random interruptions and things that are meant to put a crimp in my plans. They are often connected to a portion of the assignment that you're currently meant to fulfill in this lifetime. So I encourage you, when you encounter a difficulty, that problem, that disease, that debt, that mental anguish, that heartbreak, that financial struggle, instead of thinking that life has become unfair, I want you maybe to pause and ask a different question and think, what part of my assignment is unfolding here? Now back to Genesis 1, verse 2. The part about the spirit of the Lord that was hovering. To me, when I saw the picture, it connotes even an enjoyment. Like he was going, Oh, goody, what do I do? What am I going to do to renovate this empty, formless earth? And I know this is difficult to conceive or to understand because you're thinking, I'm scared, I'm facing this deep, dark body of water, or you're in pain because you have a disease that is eating you alive in your flesh. But even if you're not sure of yourself, be sure of him. The fact that he is resident in you, that alone should give you strength.

My surgery Story And Total Surrender

SPEAKER_01 33:38

Now, I'll tell you a story as I close, and this is my own testimony, and this was last year, 2025, in June, which is winter time here where I live. I went in for a laparoscopic intestinal surgery. I was very uncomfortable, I won't lie to you, because it was my first time ever being operated on, having any surgical instrument on me. But of course, I was prayed up. My spiritual mother had been praying for me. My friends, my family were supporting me. So I went in for the surgery. My husband takes me right up to the point where they say, No, you can't go past through here. And I am now in there. They say, Hey, count, you know, the whole thing, count backwards. They give you the intravenous dose of medicine that is just supposed to relax you and, you know, kind of paralyze you, essentially. But then the gases that they give you through your nose or your mouth are the ones that are supposed to then fully take you under. And that machine, there was a fault with that machine, and the gases were not delivering. So I was just paralyzed, but I could feel everything. And that right there is a patient, everyone's worst nightmare, awareness under anesthesia. And I'm talking about it right now, but while I was going through it, I won't lie to you, it was a very scary situation. And at that moment, when I faced the dark waters of the deep, it was scary, scary stuff. Like I said, I had no choice because there was nothing I could physically do. I had to surrender. And I remember I prayed this prayer silently because I was fully aware, though I couldn't say anything. I said, Holy Ghost, I surrender everything to you. That's all I said. And if I tell you now, I remember feeling everything like them cutting the first incision into my belly button onto my side, and but it was very short-lived. I don't remember anything else after that. I don't remember the pain. And the anesthesiologist, when I was talking to him now, afterwards, he told me that the equipment that malfunctioned kept on giving an alarm. They even tried to ignore it and say, let's proceed. And it kept on like almost sounding the worst alarm that they had to call a technician to fix it. And a surgery that was supposed to take two hours ended up taking, I think, five hours, four to five hours because of that delay. But that is how I'm telling you that even when you're not confident in yourself, in that situation where I was incapacitated physically, I surrendered to him, and the Lord hovered upon the face of my deep and dark waters that I was facing. Ladies and gentlemen, I just want to tell you that we serve a God who does not run from a challenge. And let me not even say a challenge, because if I say that, it sounds very shallow and benign. It was a deep, dark, and scary situation, but he hovered on top of the waters. The Spirit of God in that situation in Genesis 1, verse 2. I'm taking you back to the scripture, he was the first mover. Oof. Scripture tells us that he was hovering, right? That's movement. He was moving on top of the water, and before anything took shape, it was like a scene. Imagine this. Like that valley of the dry bones in Ezekiel. When you come face to face with a problem and it stares back at you, and you stare back at it, and it stares back at you, you have to know that someone between the two of you, between you and your situation, someone has to make the first move. And the pattern that I love that the Lord was showing me by this from the beginning of this scripture, the spirit of God moved first.

Move First And Do Not Sink

SPEAKER_01 38:32

So when you encounter your challenge, you must move upon it first. Rather than allowing it to settle upon you, never allow the problem to hover over your mind to a point where it presses you even down into like depths of like worry and self-pity or despair. I want you to notice something remarkable in Genesis. It says he was on the surface of the water, but he did not sink to the depths, his presence was over the surface, and he remained above that chaos, lingering on the surface. He wasn't submerged beneath it. And there's wisdom in that scripture. Whenever you face a difficulty, move upon it, be the first mover, like the Holy Ghost was. Address it, but do not never allow yourself to descend so deeply that it pulls you under to a point of like no return. The hovering posture is one that keeps you alive. I told you, the Lord told me, struggles are supposed to keep you alive. And when you're moving, stay moving only on the surface. It keeps you active, it keeps you alert and it keeps you engaged. But the moment you decide to sink beneath the waters of fear and anxiety and depth, it begins to swallow you. And it is no coincidence. I just heard this just moments ago. It's no coincidence that this situation was recorded at the beginning of scripture. That's what Genesis means. It means beginning. The spirit hovering over the chaos was not the end of the story. It was only the beginning of creation, renovation of the earth. Out of that darkness came light. Out of that formlessness came the order that we admire and see today. Like in my if you go to the Eastern Highlands, Victoria Falls, Safari, you look at animals, what everything that we see came out of that emptiness. That means that challenge that you are facing, and maybe you're not willing to really look past. You're seeing a dead end. It may be just the starting line of something new. When the spirit of the Lord within you hovers over the problem, rather than retreating from it, that moment can become your genesis moment, your beginning, the beginning of a new work of God in your life. So even before, so even when you feel like you're surrounded by darkness or overwhelmed by pressures of life, remember this. We serve a God who is not absent in the chaos, he hovers over it. Oh, thank you, Jesus. Even in the darkness, his presence is there, moving quietly and preparing that moment when the light will break through. And if his spirit lives in you, then that means you too can hover above the waters until creation begins again in your

Genesis Moments Prayer And Farewell

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life. Let me pray for you. Father in heaven, we love you so much. We thank you for such a message that has come at the right time, at the right place, in the right fashion, in the right way. Lord, I pray today. What I ask for is maturity to realize our assignments when we face challenges and we face problems. I pray, Lord, over everyone who is listening that let their challenges now be at a platform where their anointing, their giftings are going to shine. Give them the grace to hover over their situations until they can create and live in the fullness of the assignment that you sent us to do. In Jesus' name. Thank you so much for listening and joining me today. If this episode has touched you in any way, remember to share it with anyone and anybody who needs it. Now, this has been the Light of Life podcast, and as usual, stay in the light.

SPEAKER_00 44:11

Jesus Love Jesus, you are my light of life of light, light of light.