Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 25 Ask the right person. Read Daniel 4:8-18. After the king has spent all that time asking all the wrong people for help with his dream, he finally gets around to asking someone who can help him. And thankfully, the king also recognizes why Daniel can help him. The king understands that Daniel is a servant of the one true God. Daniel is able to interpret the dream because God can interpret the dream. It’s not that Daniel was any more special than anyone else, but Daniel believed and trusted in God. Because of that, the king trusted and believed in Daniel. We saw yesterday…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 24 Asking for help, and not getting it. Read Daniel 4:4-7. There have been a number of times that I have asked for help and not gotten it, and that’s always frustrating. That can look like different things at different times. Sometimes I ask for help and people help me, but not in the way, I was expecting. Other times I ask for help, but I ask the wrong people and they don’t really know how to help me, which is equally frustrating. The king experienced this second situation. He was at a place where he did not know what to do and he was…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 23 The letter. Read Daniel 4:1-3. Most people don’t enjoy sharing their difficulties, poor decisions, or humiliating experiences. Those are stories that are reserved for only a trusted few people. However, here in chapter 4 of Daniel, we see the King himself sharing a letter to all his kingdom. In this letter, we read about a humiliating and difficult situation that happened to the king. Why does he choose to share this situation with everyone? The king wants people to know and understand just how amazing and powerful God is. The king is going to tell of the miraculous and wonderous sign that God has…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 21 The recap. Read Daniel 3:27-28. For anybody who missed anything, the king does a really nice recap of the entire story right here. Three men worshipped the one true God and him alone. They defied the king and were willing to give up their lives rather than serve any one else or anything else. Then God saved them. Because of this, the king commands everyone to praise the one true God. Sometimes we need to take a moment and recap situations in our life. Things keep happening every single day and we make our way through. But, do we take a moment once a…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 20 The king tells them to come out of the fire. Read Daniel 3:26. If you’ve ever grabbed ahold of a hot pan, you understand that you generally don’t have to be told to let go of something that’s on fire. Typically, that happens automatically. Your body’s response is to let go of something that you’ve grabbed that’s too hot. However, these 3 men, after having been thrown into a fiery furnace that killed other people, were walking around in there like it was nothing. They had to be told to come out. The king, who threw them in, was the one who told them…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 19 The mystery man. Read Daniel 3:24-25. In the verse before, we see that the king jumped up in amazement. I bet he did. He knew exactly what he expected to see when he looked into the furnace. And what he saw was completely unexpected. He knew he threw three men in the furnace. And yet all three of them plus one extra were walking around in the furnace as though nothing was wrong. I often wonder why the three men were walking around in there instead of walking back out, but they waited until the king called them out. Also, we know that the…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 18 Not everyone appreciates when you have integrity. Read Daniel 3:19-23. When you choose to take a stand and maintain integrity in situations, not everybody is going to love that. There will be people who actually really wish that you would just go along with the flow and do whatever anybody else is doing. People with integrity do not always fit in. Unfortunately, the world does not always have integrity and when other people do, it can be very difficult to manage through that situation. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego figured that out quickly. They shared their convictions with the king and explained to him the…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 17 Integrity. Read Daniel 3:13-18. Every discussion of leadership needs to have a piece that is tied back to integrity. You truly cannot be a leader, if you do not have integrity. However, that looks different for different people at different times. Ultimately, for these 3 men, integrity looked like them standing before the King and refusing to bow down and worship, anyone or anything other than the one true God. They managed that in an incredibly interesting way. They recognized that God could save them. They could live through the king’s wrath and the king’s punishment. God was capable of that, and they knew…

Leading Through Challenging Circumstances, Day 16 The bigger picture. Read Daniel 3:8-12. I’ve read this story numerous times and seen this depicted in lots of children’s Bibles and children’s stories, but I never really noticed these verses until today. So often we’re taught that this whole story is about 3 men who stood up to the king. They refused to bow down to him and would worship God alone, and that is completely true. However, there is an additional aspect of this that I hadn’t noticed before. These men were set up because they were Jews. This was a hate crime that was initiated because the other wise men that…