Success breeds the desire for more success. If God does not show us our weaknesses, we begin to think that earthly attainment is what we need to be happy. We start to believe that this is what life is about, and without it, contentment starts to disappear. In weakness, Christ calls out to us and says, “do not find your joy in the good or the bad times; find it in me. I am your salvation.” 

And he [Samson] was very thirsty, and he called upon the Lord and said, “You have granted this great salvation by the hand of your servant, and shall I now die of thirst and fall into the hands of the uncircumcised?” Judges 15:18
Many times, when God has strengthened us and given us a victory, we will soon find ourselves confounded by our weakness. That is why this passage about Samson is so encouraging. Here is a man who, by the strength of God, defeated many of the enemies of Israel and then, moments later, finds himself about to die from the lack of something as simple as water.
When God gives us victory in doing His work, it is easy to see ourselves as stronger than we are. So, the Lord often allows situations to arise that keep us dependent upon Him. We often thank the Lord for His grace in times of triumph, but how often do we forget to thank Him for our times of defeat? If all things work for the good of those who love Him, then grace comes in many forms. It comes in strength, but it also comes in weakness.
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The sum of our complaints is neatly captured in God’s challenge to Job: “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.” Here then is what all our murmuring amounts to: not justified expressions of displeasure, but rank rebellion against the King of heaven; clay daring to find fault with the Potter. 

And the LORD said to Job: “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.’”Job 40:1-2
One antidote against a bitter, complaining spirit is to remember the very obvious truth that you are not God.
What you are is a creature made in the image of God. But He is the eternal Creator and sovereign ruler of all things in heaven and earth. To put things in focus, before you ever existed—before matter arranged itself by divine decree into an embryonic conglomerate of cells and tissues joined to an eternal soul—God was speaking worlds into existence. He was commanding the rise and fall of empires. He was fashioning such creatures as the hippo and crocodile, the common house fly and the Japanese murder hornet. He was setting the bounds of created reality, speaking stars and galaxies into existence that no human eye would ever see, and delighting in the divine joke that would one day be the ostrich.
All these God created and upholds by the power of His Word. But we’re upset that the light turned red. Or that the toothpaste is empty again. Or that the gas light is on and we’re already running late. To put not too fine a point on it, each day a veritable tsunami of blessing goes forth from the throne of the triune God, and each day a near ceaseless drone of nitpicking ascends in return. Like Israel grumbling in the wilderness, shockingly blind to God’s goodness and provision, so are we on a normal Tuesday afternoon. We really are stunningly audacious creatures.
The sum of our complaints, however, is neatly captured in God’s challenge to Job: “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.” Here then is what all our murmuring amounts to: not justified expressions of displeasure, but rank rebellion against the King of heaven; clay daring to find fault with the Potter.
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“We were not in a normal time of normal bad human politics and normal bad destructive material choices. I realized gradually that the degradation taking place on the material plane simply reflected or manifested a much larger battle—indeed a spiritual battle; one between Good and Evil themselves, and that God—whom till now I hesitated to mention in public—was of course central to what we were witnessing; and He is central, I slowly realized, to whether or not we will survive. And I discovered that it is only in human love, care, and intimacy, ultimately, that God lives, and moves in, and rescues, if they are to be rescued, our lives.”

It is interesting how some individuals make a radical about-face as they become aware of inconvenient truths and unpleasant realities. That was true of so many people who endured the Covid years. They came to see that something was not right, and that so much of what we thought to be true just wasn’t. They came to realise that they were being lied to. They were being conned.
Many such people can be mentioned, but American writer Naomi Wolf is certainly one of them. She has been on a real journey in this regard.  In her brand-new book, Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith, and Resistance in a New Dark Age (Chelsea Green, 2023) she continues to speak out on vitally important issues that she has addressed in previous volumes.
For example, in 2007 she released The End of America, and in 2022 she came out with The Bodies of Others. See my review of that later volume here.
Everything that happened in 2020-2022 really turned her world even more upside down than it had been. Like so many others, she came to see that something very sinister – even Satanic – was happening. She had been such a key part of the woke, progressive left for so many years, but the Covid Wars made it clear that most of the left was NOT on her side anymore. Or rather, she was no longer on their side.
Her new book deserves a proper review, which I hope to do soon. But just alerting people to it, in the form of quoting from her Introduction, will have to suffice here. It alone is worth sharing far and wide. Early on she speaks of how the world changed, pre- and post-Covid. She says this about how things so radically changed:
This story begins in the “Before” world.
“Before” the years 2020 to 2022, when a set of policies based on abject lies posed an existential threat to our democracy and our way of life….
“Before” the Left – the subculture that used to stand for human rights, freedom of speech, real science, critical thinking, and skepticism about Big Government and Big Corporations, let alone about their merger, and that used to fight against discrimination and inequality—fell into a trance in which that same group became champions of censorship, and of a two-tier society in which some people, as the pigs declared in Animal Farm, are “more equal” than others; and fell prey to magical thinking and cultlike behavior.
“Before” the media—which used to see itself as the source of investigation of elite powers; which used to ask questions about received narratives; which used to demand that its journalists produce evidence and independent verification before drawing conclusions in print—were bought out by Big Government via the CARES Act, and by Big Pharma directly, and by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to the extent that almost all legacy media became unquestioning stenographers for interested parties aligned with the global powers who dictated the harmful nonsense.
I miss the “Before Times.”
She goes on to discuss in detail how she was cancelled by the very people and organisations she was once such a big part of:
The moment I began asking basic questions on my Twitter feed specifically about the novel mRNA injections—the kinds of questions I had asked for three decades about silicone breast implants; about high estrogen levels in birth control pills; about dangerous IUDs; about vaginal mesh, or industrial hospital birthing practices and high for-profit C-section rates—my bio changed everywhere, online, and all at once.
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