We are taught
to trust God.
We are
taught to be patient.
This
means not freaking
out,
trying to do everything on our own, etc.
On Wednesday,
Sadrac and I showed up
for a
Bible study that
went
over James 5:7-12:
“Be
patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming
of the
Lord. See how the farmer
waits
for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it,
until
it receives the early and the late rains.
You
also, be patient” (V7-8).
Today
it struck me:
Patience
and trust mean
fully giving myself to the plans of the
Lord.
We are
in the midst of a visa battle.
I call
it a battle because it is a long,
drawn-out
saga that includes $100’s of dollars,
paperwork,
as well as falsified documents given by the government, etc.
We have
battled the government for papers,
and the
Embassy for answers.
We
thought we’d be spending our 9th day in the States today,
instead
we are barely further now than where we were in January.
We both
finished our jobs by the start of June—
planning
on moving countries less than two weeks later.
Lately I’ve
been rehearsing stages of our process in my brain,
and when
I do it’s overwhelming.
But I just
realized that maybe trusting in God and having patience
in His plan
means
NOT
doing this—
not replaying
how things could’ve gone differently,
what we
could’ve changed,
so that
we’d be further along now.
Maybe
letting those things go
is part
of that magnificent and
beautiful
struggle of placing
everything
back into God’s hands—
for real.
For
weeks now, I’ve been able to express
my
heartfelt conviction that
God
knows what we need and He hasn’t forgotten us,
and
that we just need to trust him.
But
last week I went into past-exploration mode,
where I
mentally listed all the things
that
relied on us: turning in this paper,
translating
that paper, etc.
I searched
the nooks and crannies of all the things
we did in between turning papers in to
the Embassy,
and I interrogated
myself:
What if
we’d turned in that paper sooner?
What if
I’d taken off an extra day of work to do that?
What if
we’d thought to ask this question?
It was
exhausting and horrifying.
I was
smothering myself in my own self-reliance.
You
see, I’m an expert at control,
aka
thinking I have control.
Reality
check: I have no control over what already passed
yesterday,
last week, last month, last year.
We did
what we felt we needed to do at the time,
then we
put things in God’s hands.
Yet the
temptation to flirt with what me, myself,
& I,
could’ve
done better, faster is strong.
If I can
accuse myself, or someone else
(yeah,
what about that guy who gave us fraudulent
papers in
the name of the government,
or the
mean people I’ve talked to on the phone,
or the
Embassy who is short-staffed in the department
we’ve
applied to),
of why
things aren’t where we hoped they would be,
then at
least I have a victim to blame.
Maybe
this is also a substitute
for the
blame I really place on…God?
I’m not
sure,
but
today I saw for the first time
that
living in those moments
reflects
my distrust
in the
One who I long to trust.
What I need
now is
to
simply wait—
in the
present moment.
I
stressed this past week because I applied
for a
bunch of online jobs and didn’t hear
back. I
spent hours applying and
updating
my profile.
Maybe
trusting God is doing what I’ve done
and
then just waiting.
Hounding
the site, obsessing over checking for responses,
is this
another form of my
distrust
and impatience
in His
perfect timing?
I’m
putting this in writing,
and I’m
making it public now,
because
I tend to neglect
finishing
my writing until the
situation
has been resolved.
This,
right now, is a practice of my faith,
during
the waiting,
proclaiming
that I trust in the Lord’s timing,
and I desire
to desire to wait patiently as He does His thing.
