“Even if You don’t…”
I begged… again.
“Please, Father. Please heal me.”
The verse about how faith could heal me came to mind.
“Maybe I just don’t have enough faith. Maybe that’s why He isn’t healing me.” I thought aloud. “But the Bible says I only need a tiny bit for it to be enough. And I do still have that tiny bit- don’t I?”
“Please, God, help me get that tiny bit of faith back if I’ve lost it along the way, so I can be healed.”
I was to scared to ask Him to give me Peace if I didn’t heal. I was too frightened to ask for Hope lest I be discouraged again. I was too used to feeling alone and fighting alone to believe Love would do any good. And I didn’t believe for a moment that Joy was possible again with so much pain.
Mostly, though, God, I didn’t ask You for these things because they mean asking to be okay “Even if You don’t…”
Judges 6:40, "And God did so that night: for it was dry upon the fleece only, and there was dew on all the ground."
We love this story of Gideon and his fleece from the book of Judges. How many times have we put out a fleece for God to give us direction? I know I do it fairly often, though granted not nearly as specific as Gideon dared to do. (Maybe my faith is a little on the tepid side?)
Think to yourself, though, how many more times than that even do we put out a fleece believing for it to be asking for direction, when, in reality, it is a display of our “if, then” commitment to and faith in the Lord?
Sometimes we ask for a sign, but then we forget to keep watch for it and miss it when it comes.
There are other times we ask and God doesn’t give us any kind of special signal whatsoever because He’s already equipped us with the insight we need to know which direction to take at the fork in the path.
Sometimes He sends a sign when our souls are searching without us even realizing it, and it’s up to us to figure out what it means. (Like the fact that dragonflies keep landing on my knee or hand every time I kayak. Or when I looked up through tears at the black sky last night and saw a broken meteorite sailing through the sky in no hurry whatsoever.)
And then there are times we ask according to His Will, should we be wise enough to do so, and we receive as requested and recognize His faithfulness blissfully.
But more often than not, we don’t know what we need well enough to pray according to God’s will. And He loves us too much to give us lesser things, even if they feel better in the moment.
How often do we pray to be okay when the answer is “no”? A “not yet” still has human hope left in it for the future. But a “no” can shatter the soul when we are already begging on our knees. How often do we ask for more strength so that our greatest disappointments lose their pungency rather than beg not to be disappointed one more time?
Typically we send out our desperate pleas asking God to calm the storm engulfing and crushing us. But He seems more interested in meeting us in the very center of it where, despite the furry and turmoil that surrounds, there lies a Peace… a Stillness… like no other.
In our feeble humanness we often fail to remember that God’s blessings can come in the raindrops too, and that His comfort can be felt most vividly whilst in tears of surrender.
If God doesn’t answer your prayers as you’ve begged… if He doesn’t give you a sign… if He doesn’t cater to your “if/then” contingencies, it’s likely because He wants to know you are willing to wait on Him and that you trust Him… no strings attached.
