After
a lengthy time of doing all I know to bring resolution to an ongoing difficulty,
last week I knelt down, took a hammer and nailed the painful situation to the cross.
Since
then, I’ve struggled not to revisit, and must remind myself daily of that act
of relinquishment.
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| Cross of Nails |
And
then, this morning, I read from A. B. Simpson: “If we wholly trust an interest
to God, we must keep our hands off it; and He will guard it for us better than
we can help Him…Things may seem to be going all wrong, but He knows as well as
we; and He will arise in the right moment if we are really trusting Him so
fully as to let Him work in His own way and time. There is nothing so masterly
as inactivity in some things, and there is nothing so hurtful as restless
working, for God has undertaken to work His sovereign will.”
It’s
hard to let something go into God’s hands. It’s harder still to leave it there.
Especially when circumstances seem to be going south.
It
feels wrong not to act. To lie still in the face of apparent impending disaster
seems nearly impossible. Yet all of our acting to this point has yielded no
results.
The
truth is God works his will in us through this suffering and adversity.
From
I Peter 1, “In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead…In this you greatly
rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all
kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith…may be proved genuine and
may result in praise, glory, and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.”
The
Message says, “…genuine faith put through this suffering comes out proved
genuine…”
Putting
our heartaches into God’s hands and trusting Him with them, helps prove our
faith genuine. To lie still, to trust, to allow our hands to be at rest and
allow Him to act as only He can in His time will yield a harvest of faith not
only in the lives of those for whom we pray but in our own as well.
And
if you’re like me and are struggling to stop fixing things, that’s good news.