Trust Walk

One step forward.  Then another.

I can't even begin to describe how different last fall was from this one.  Last fall, I had just touched down on surviving the baby and preschool years with both my kids.  The youngest had just started full-time school and I had finally made it.  That first semester was so very peaceful.

I spent my days reading, writing, listening to music, walking and jogging, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone with my thoughts.  Every moment was beautiful, every word a prayer, music and nature a communion with God.  It was healing, after the baby and preschool years.  It was growth, as God used the reading, the writing, the solitude, the conversations, to speak to my heart about the ways I needed to be refined in order to better know and follow Him.  I felt like He was preparing me, like He always had been preparing me, for something much bigger than me.

Then, before I felt ready, He called me out of peace, and into chaos.  Through my new job, He gave me a ministry to learn and to lead, new people to learn and to love.  Through the adoption process, He gave me a calling to follow, a challenge to face.  Through my dad's cancer, He gave me a burden to bear.

One step forward.  Then another.

This is how I have been proceeding.  For a while, I thought the chaos would end.  If only I can make it to summer, my schedule won't be so demanding and I won't feel so overwhelmed.  Welcome to my first summer as a working-mom.  Chaos.  If only I can make it to the start of school and get my kids back in the routine, my schedule won't be so demanding and I won't feel so overwhelmed.  Chaos still.

Every moment is an overwhelming choice of what person or area in my life has the greatest need for attention.  The funny thing is, much of this is an answer to prayer.  I have spent the past eight years praying about adoption for our family and for God to grow me into ministry. I have spent the past eleven years praying that my husband would grow into the kind of Christ-loving man who would lead bible study against his own inhibitions, who would say yes to the chaos of adoption, who would support the challenges of having a wife in ministry.  I have even spent the past sixteen years since I came to faith, praying that I would grow into the kind of Christ-follower who would be strong enough to stand in faith in the midst of hard times.  I expected that God would answer my prayers, but I did not expect them to be answered all at the same time, like one big cosmic practical joke, a fire hose bursting with answered prayer, too much to handle at any one moment.

And with our adoption license about to be finalized, and my dad not doing well at all lately, there truly is no end in sight to the chaos.  I want to stop, and go back to the quiet days.  The days when it was just me and God and the quiet of my home.  I want to give up on these dreams of ministry and adoption and faith, and just crumple.  Ministry, and adoption, and faith in hard times, are God-ordained and God-inspired, but they are hard and I am tired.

I have been crying.  A lot.  I have been calling out to God for help, asking if this is really the path to which He has called me, even though I know it is.  I have been merely surviving all that has passed and dreading all that is coming.  I have been hanging on, one step forward, and then another, to the path He has placed at my feet.

Now, that is trust, but it is trust without much confidence, like when you're being blindfolded and led on a trust walk by a friend, and you trust enough to go slowly, but your arms are out and your feet are shuffling, just in case the friend leads you wrong.  That is how I have been walking...bracing for impact at every moment.

This morning, God rocked my trust walk strategy.  I have been looking for a book to read in my quiet times that fits where I'm struggling.  At the beginning of the month, and a few times since then, God has brought to mind My Utmost for His Highest by Oswald Chambers.  I just hadn't actually grabbed it until today.  It is a daily devotional book that was given to me by my mentor-friend Karen, when I first came to real faith at the age of nineteen.

As I finally grabbed the book this morning, I was thinking over all these thoughts I had written above.  I opened it to the blank inside cover and found the inscription Karen had written sixteen years ago:

September 18, 1997

I am so glad that we have gotten

to know each other this year!

I pray that this book may be a source

of delight and strength for you.

"It is the Lord who goes before you.

He will be with you; he will not

fail you or forsake you.  Do not

fear or be dismayed."

Deuteronomy 31:8

Joyfully in Christ,

Karen

As soon as I read those words, my heart was rocked by God's amazing ways, that He would use a friend's note from sixteen years ago to speak to me exactly what I needed to hear to follow Him today.  Delight and strength are so very much what I am lacking right now, and I feel like her prayer from sixteen years ago speaks healing to my soul when I need it most.  

And then the scripture she chose!  It seems such a random choice, but wow did it speak to me now, as I talk about the path He has placed before me, and how I dread and shuffle to go there. "It is the Lord who goes before you."  Don't you love how God encourages His people, not with pithy quips about their own strength or valor ("I won't give you more than you can handle!" or "You are strong enough to face this giant!").  No!  He encourages His people with rock-solid truth of His own strength and valor: "It is the Lord who goes before you.  He will be with you.  He will not fail you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed."

I am not strong enough for this.  But I don't have to be.  God is giving me more than I can handle.  But I do not have to handle it alone.  He is going before me.  He has already gone before me in this same walk.  He has experienced the heart-breaking loss of One He loves.  He has faced the challenges of adopting into His family those who reject Him and cause Him grief.  He has ministered to countless millions of needy people.  He sees my heart, my grief, my fear, my wavering faith, and He knows, because He has gone before me.  He is with me.  He will not fail me or forsake me.

I can't even begin to explain how this crushes my heart and heals it, all at the same time.  The God I serve is a mighty God.  He is big enough for me to trust with blind abandon.  And so I shall proceed. One step forward.  Then another.