Dear Daughters,
I cringe every time I read about the Israelites traveling through the desert because I feel like I am often just like them. Even though they had been freed from horribly oppressive slavery in Egypt they repeatedly wandered around, complaining, impatient, depressed and discouraged.
In Joyce Meyer’s Battlefield of the Mind we find #5 of the Wilderness Mentalities:
I shouldn’t have to wait.
Now that’s a good one for our immediate gratification society of which we have become such a part. When you consider that everything around us screams that we should have it our way now, we deserve the best now, we need fast food fast, pain relief now, it’s quite a shocker that God would actually expect us to wait.
The beautiful thing about God, though, is that He doesn’t change just because our society changes. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. If He expected people thousands of years ago to wait for Him then He expects us to wait as well.
If you haven’t experienced this already in your life, I will tell you a fact that I’ve learned: God is not efficient. He is in absolutely no hurry to give you what you think you want or need. When I got sick three years ago and had to quit teaching school mid-year, I was certain that I just needed a few months of rest and then would be back to school in the fall.
God had different plans.
Having struggled with insomnia for over ten years, by February 2012 my body simply would not go on. Being so tired, exhausted, completely spent and still not able to sleep well had cast a long shadow over a decade of my life. So I finally collapsed, able to go no longer. The majority of my days were spent alone on the couch, so fatigued, wilted like a flower. Meds had helped me survive through many years – barely – but now I was weary of life, exhausted and still unable to sleep, night or day without artificial help.
So often when challenging circumstances come, we ask the question, “Why is this happening to me?” We all have plans for our lives, good things we want for our kids, for us, our marriages, our husbands – and most of them have not yet happened. But how would our attitudes change if we asked the question, “Why is this happening for me?”
As I lay on the couch I became impatient, depressed, discouraged. Around this time of despondency I got a package in the mail from Aunt Rhonda. It was a CD by Laura Story, and included the song Blessings in which she sings:
…what if your blessings come through raindrops,
what if your healing comes through tears,
what if a thousand sleepless nights are what it takes to know You’re near….
I had never heard the song before and as I listened to the words I wept, I felt as if the song had been written for me. As months went by and still so little recovery, I lamented that my physical healing was not happening as I waited. Yet something better was happening – a change in my heart.
When my body collapsed and was subjected to hours on the couch I needed God and Dad more than I ever had before. I couldn’t shop for groceries, I rarely left the house. I had to learn that my identity was being a child of God, not doing all those things that had become such a part of my life – a music teacher, mother, preacher’s wife, Bible Study leader….
Before I got sick I was proud of who I was, what I could do, and often I didn’t feel as if I really needed God all that much. Sure, I went to church every Sunday, attended Bible studies, I even read the Bible on my own once in a while. But over all I was self-confident about what I did. I had gifts, I had talents and I used them for God. Independence, the ability to do things on my own was what I loved.
But now I had to allow Dad to take care of me, do most of the stuff I used to do. Interestingly, as he did, my love for him grew. We talked better than we ever had, we were honest about things that in the past we had simply let slide.
God uses marriage and other hardships as a crucible to refine us, heal us, teach us to love, and above all become like Him in character, especially learning that difficult trait called patience, learning to wait.
So often we want to have a life that is happy and trouble-free. Everyone wants their own Utopia. But history has proven over and over again that when our lives are easy, everything going our way, we forget God. Only when circumstances come that are out of our control, do we cry out for help.
Throughout the Bible, in story after story, people forget about God when times are good. So God lovingly allows a little misery and hardship to come. Inevitably there is repentance, sorrow and sadness from the people who had tried to live without God. And as always, God has mercy and grace and forgives His people time after time, year after year, century after century. It’s often only when we are hurting, wounded, and weakened that we cry out to God for help. When you stop to think about it, it’s quite a self-centered way to live, but it’s typical human nature. As I look on my life I had behaved exactly the same way.
I have learned that God is never in a hurry to change us, never in a hurry to demand we be more loving, more submissive, more compassionate. He knows our weaknesses, our brokenness, our struggles and he simply encourages us every day to wait on Him and trust the Holy Spirit to change us and our marriages moment by moment, day by day, year after year. Then slowly, gradually, we will grow to be the women that God has intended us to be.
Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word.
You are good and what you do is good: teach me your decrees.
Psalm 119:67-68
Love, Mom
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