Trust God

I woke up this morning to my eight year old daughter climbing into my bed crying “mommy I have a headache”. I reached over and felt her little shivering body as she climbed over me to snuggle in the middle of my husband and myself and her body was on fire. I got up, stumbled my way around in the dark until I bumped into the door and made my way to the kitchen. I fumbled through the medicine cabinet until I found some fever reducer, pain reliever medicine, filled a glass full of water and made my way back to the bedroom. She is such a big girl, she swallowed her medicine like a champ and disappeared into the over sized comforter on our bed and sighed a sigh of relief. Without question or hesitation she took what I gave her, trusted it would help her and then peacefully went back to sleep. Of course my husband and I both reached over and laid hands on her and prayed for her but I believe in doctors and medicine and that everything God created is good and can be used for good; however we will not discuss theology today. My amazement was that without knowing what I gave her (it was still dark) she took it, no questions asked, believed it would help and then just peacefully went back to sleep. You may be thinking, but you are her mother, she should trust you. You are right, she should, we have never given her reason not to trust us. But my thoughts turned to the Lord and I thought to myself shouldn’t we trust our Father in heaven even when we don’t know what He is doing.

I am not a master theologian, I have not even been able to read the bible from cover to cover, even though I study it daily, and I still use the bible dictionary because I do not understand all the of the words or the context in which they are sometimes used; but what I do have is trust. I have come to a place in my relationship with God that I truly understand the scripture Isaiah 55:8-9 when it says  “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,”declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” I may not always like it but I understand it. I trust that God loves me so much that He sent His own Son to die for me and take the place of my own sin so that I can live an amazingly victorious life. I do not have all of the answers to the “why” questions and through 19 years of study and serving God I have had hundreds of why questions thrown at me. I simply choose to trust and believe. My trust nor my belief have steered me wrong yet. I can honestly say that every single scripture I have read and read in the context in which it is meant to be and then applied it to my life has brought me nothing but victory in every circumstance. Does it always happen at the time I want it to? No. Does it always happen the way I want it to? No. Does it happen? Yes. Am I still waiting for some stuff to happen? Yes. Do I have peace while I am waiting that God is working it out better than I could? Yes.

I remember wanting a baby girl so bad I couldn’t sleep at night. I would lay awake in bed and think about her, dream about her and long for the day Tom would give in and say okay we can try for a third child. It took four long years of praying, learning to shut up and let God work with Tom’s heart in His timing not mine and trusting that if it wasn’t part of God’s plan for my life then I would have peace. I remember when the day came that Tom came to me and said okay we can try for a third child. It was just a regular day and I hadn’t been bugging him about it for months. I had learned to shut up (hard for women) and let God do His thing. The test became increasingly harder when I found out my sister was pregnant but I hung in there. Okay I may have sobbed very loudly in the bathroom, with the door shut, while Tom was in the next room, but I didn’t actually say anything to him about it. Yes, true story I cried, but it was a learning curve so cut a girl some slack. However, when the day came that Tom agreed to start trying again, I hadn’t cried in months, not around him anyway; it was like a light from heaven itself shone around my husband and he immediately became the sexiest man alive. Then in a twist of events it took us a bit of trying before we finally conceived. But Hallelujah we did conceive and nine months later a beautiful baby girl was born. I had to get to a place where I completely and honestly trusted the Lord with my future, with my family and with my life because He honestly knew what was the best for us; He knows our future and we don’t.

I know some of you have been praying for much more serious situations and for much longer time frames but I want to encourage you not to give up. My dad has degenerative disc disease in his spine and it has been excruciating to watch him suffer over the last 15 years, but just recently we got some miraculous news. He has had four major back surgeries and a fifth one was inevitable but glory be to God we just got the word he does not need a fifth surgery. This was a fourteen year prayer in the making and we are just now seeing the manifestations of those prayers. He is on his way to recovery and the healing has begun.  If I wanted to examine every year and every situation and every circumstance I am sure I could see some of the reasons it has taken so long, but the point is we never gave up, we kept trusting God and His Word and He never left us; He gave us peace and breakthroughs when we needed them. That peace and those breakthroughs were extremely valuable and they gave us what we needed to keep on pressing through each and every day and we were able to continue living life victoriously while on the journey.

Not once in the bible does it say that we won’t go through hard times, have difficult days, be sad or depressed or feel defeated. No, it simply says that God will never leave you during those times and that His strength will be all you need to get you through. The bible is filled with promise after promise for how you can have daily victory in your life even when life seems not worth living. It is a process and a long one at that but it is so worth it. When you have the Word of God imprinted on your heart you have things that money can’t buy. You have peace, love, joy, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control. Who wouldn’t buy some self-control if they could? Or some peace? How much do we just long for a day of peace? I know I do and with God I have many of them.

I think the greatest thing I have learned in my journey of Christianity is to simply trust God. You can be a believer but still have trust issues. You can believe Jesus died on the cross for your sins and you can believe in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; and that will get you into heaven, but there is so much more. The more comes when you choose to trust God with everything in your life and trust that His ways are best even when you don’t understand them. It is like being in an eternal classroom with endless possibilities for great and wonderful things to happen in your life; even in the midst of the storm the sun is still going to shine again.

My thoughts return to my Maggie as I hear her stirring in the next room. The bible says in Matthew 18:3 “ And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Children are so easy to trust, forgive and love. I think that is what God meant when He said to become like little children. If we all tried harder to trust more, forgive more and love more then the world just might get better after all. I think I will learn this lesson set before me today by my youngest daughter; trust and rest in that trust. God Bless.