Today is January 15, and I’m sitting on my mom’s couch gratefully processing a very different January 15 from nine years ago. This popped up on my FB feed this morning:
It was a day of total blind faith… a day in the midst of a life-changing and life-challenging season for our little family of four.
Several years earlier, the economy had tanked, and after hanging on for two years, we were thrust into the club of thousands of others in the Nashville area… the unemployed.
I was a homemaker and worked in ministry jobs that paid mostly with “eternal rewards” and my husband worked in a Nashville based ministry that had been downsizing for the past two years. Eventually his position was deleted, and we found ourselves dropped into an entirely new place of trusting in the Lord. (You can read about stops along that journey here.)
Because of the nature of my husband’s job, he was almost immediately contacted by various churches and job offers, so it seemed as if this would be a relatively short season of unemployment. (We even planned for what we would do with the “leftover money from the severance package”! HA!)
However, the Lord had other ideas for us. With every offer my husband received, the Lord led us to turn it down. (And we had some really incredible opportunities!) It didn’t make one bit of human sense to us, or to others.
As time ticked by, we started counting down the remaining months, weeks, and days of that blessed severance package… which included our health insurance. The end date of it all was January 15, 2010.
I’d never before been afraid of a calendar date. But this one… it meant that what we had been depending upon for living would be completely gone… and God had not yet brought us to His best next place.
{Did you catch the phrase, “What we had been depending upon for living…”? Yeah… me too. That was obviously one of the things the Lord wanted to change in our lives.}
Unintentionally, I had what Experiencing God would call “a crisis of belief” as my hurting heart couldn’t stop wondering WHY God would continue to allow this to happen to us, when all we were doing with every bit of our beings was just trying to faithfully serve Him. {Ever felt this way???}
Oh man… I learned SO MUCH that forever changed my life during that season!!!
But the thing I wanted to share today is what I learned realized right before January 15 of 2010. It was actually written to me by a sweet friend the week before:
“The God who loves you, provides for you, comforts you, and sustains you on the 14th, will be the same God who loves you, provides for you, comforts you, and sustains you on the 15th…”
This was/and is SO true! Of course it is!
God does NOT operate by a calendar or a clock… or even a human deadline, for that matter. The Bible is FULL of examples of this, and though my “head” had known it for years… it finally found it’s home in my “heart.”
In the days just before that dreaded January 15… and in the thousands of days after… The Lord has always shown Himself faithful. Though His timing is not always (or often???) what I would choose… we KNOW that it is always BEST.
I’m needing this reminder again today. How about you?
Do you need to be reminded of God’s Ever-Faithful timing?
If so, soak in these verses below:
“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord.
“And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.
For just as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so my ways are higher than your ways
and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.
Isaiah 55:8-9 (NLT)
So… you and I can say with great peace:
But this I call to mind,
and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”The Lord is good to those who wait for him,
to the soul who seeks him.
2It is good that one should wait quietly
for the salvation of the Lord.
Lamentations 3:21-26 (ESV)
Beautiful… right?
There’s more encouragement on that subject here
Today, and forever… in the pleasant seasons and the difficult… whether or not clocks and calendars are counting… may we all learn to “Wait patiently for the LORD. Be brave and courageous. Yes, wait patiently for the LORD.” Psalm 27:14
Waiting with you~
