I ask myself, When did you begin to grow? Was it when everything fell apart or did it start before?
There seems to me to be a piece of everything that’s happened in everything that came before. Nothing simply appeared. If I hadn’t gone to a sleepover in seventh grade at the house of a girl I didn’t know very well. If I hadn’t been at a certain Bible study my first week of college. If that other boy hadn’t been bitter, if she hadn’t thrown me that surprise 20th birthday party. It was all so tenuous. It could have all turned out differently. But it didn’t. And this evidence reminds me that God’s plan is sometimes interwoven so by little things that it may seem at times as though nothing at all is happening. But then something will happen, like a couple offering to raise your child and give her the home that you would have wanted for her, and looking back, all the steps will come together.
And this is what I need to keep sight of.
I am contemplating what to do. I feel sometimes like I’m just sitting on my hands, and in reality, sometimes I am. But there is a time when one needs to be still. Be still and know that I am God, he says. Be still, let peace overcome you. Be still, I’m still working even when you don’t see it. Be still, stop your thrashing.
The Lord is so providential. He has seen all things and known all things, paid the penalty for all things, and still retains such patience for me. He knows all of my screw ups, not just for today but for the rest of my life and still he gives me the opportunity to screw up, to recognize my errors, to learn, to grow, to come to lean on him more fully. The wiser I become, the more I recognize that I have no wisdom but that which is imparted to me by my father. The stronger I become, the more I know that my own strength leads me into temptation. The more I am made aware of who I am in God, the more I recognize that I am nothing but a vessel. The joy in those lessons seems nihilistic.
I don’t feel as filled with the spirit as I used to. I don’t mention this to imply that devotion should be based on feelings. I mention it because the time when I have felt the most fervently devout, the most concretely spiritual , the most rapturously in love, was in the summer and early fall of last year. My mother’s health was failing and I was able to share with her some of the good work God was doing in me, some of the gifts and blessings of understanding that he was giving me. At hospice, I was blessed to be able to read scripture to her and pray over her. I prayed over her for what seemed like hours (and may have been) the night before she died. Had it have been a year earlier, I don’t know that I would have done that. Not that I didn’t believe in prayer and Scripture at that time. Only God had not brought me so close before then. And I wonder if he gave himself more fully to me then so that I might be able to conduct his comfort to her.
Of course, I don’t know the full purpose of God. Of course, there may be some other and more pressing reason that God chose to bring me to himself just then. I don’t know when he may use whatever I am or have been or will be to bring glory to himself. But that idea of myself as conductor, as tool, that absence of myself in that conversation resonates within me as something so lovely and divine. That God might use me to help someone else.
So I have to learn to not be so egotistical. I need to not have an ego at all. I need to not ask, How does this benefit me? I need not to ask even, How does this benefit my ministry? I need to trust in God, honestly seeking him, honestly asking him to grow me however he may see fit, in whatever manner he devises, and know that he is working all of this to his greater glory and to the fulfillment of his purpose. Though he slay me, I will yet praise him. That’s it.
Tags: Barbara Sue, hope, humility, identity in God, lessons, Natalie Grace, providence, trust in God
