Trusting God With the Whole Timeline

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 9^th 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.