There is no small thing before the Lord, there is no small story, no small disappointment, no small heartbreak. Our disappointment is our disappointment. God cares about the details of our lives and He cares about how He wants to draw us to a greater understanding of who He is through the things in our lives that cause us to wrestle with His character most. There is no small thing that the Lord doesn’t want to use to speak into our lives. I know that there are people reading our story who are going through their own disappointments in life, a reminder of past losses, a broken relationship, a loveless marriage, infertility, wondering if God will ever bring them a husband/wife, a job lost, a misbehaving child, a frustration with the way that life is, or grieving with us. I don’t know what your story is, but Kevin and I pray that our story would not just be about us, but about God and how He intersects in our story and the disappointments in life in ways that produce great Joy and cause us to know Him rightly. We hope that God may use how He’s speaking into our story to speak into yours. Before this heartache my greatest sadness was wrestling with God over singleness for 33 years. (I’m 34 now, Kevin and I were married just last year). I’m realizing that much of my responses to the character of God in this last week have been rooted in my heart long before, as I wrestled with Him and His goodness in singleness. Now there are new aspects of His character I am wrestling with. I am amazed that the God of the universe wants us to know Him rightly, and wants us not only to have a relationship with Him, but an intimate one. And I am thankful that He would allow the challenging aspects of life to root out aspects of our belief in Him that are off, to let us wrestle with Him so that we can know who He really is. Oh how He loves us!
John 17:3 says “Now this is eternal life: that they may KNOW you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” Eternal life is not just “I get to go to heaven when I die”, It’s I get to spend from now until eternity getting to know my Savior, getting to know my King. In college God led me to Philippians 3:7-11 which has become a life verse to me and prayer of my heart “But whatever, gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ…” (v.7-8) I want to KNOW Jesus in the same way that Paul does, being so convinced that knowing God is worth whatever He may walk us through that we may know Him rightly. Be careful what you pray for :). I often say the wisest prayers for our life are often prayed when we are naïve to how they may be answered! I don’t think for a second that God has to and will always use suffering to help us know Him more. In fact most of my life has not been hard at all. It has been a great adventure, and it still is. Though I do think it is often the trials in our life that expose what we really believe about God and either gives us an opportunity to turn to Him and let Him speak into those or spend more time questioning than pressing into Him.
So God is opening Kevin and my heart currently to new aspects of His character that we are wrestling with. We are wrestling with faith in ways that we haven’t before. We believe we serve a Powerful God who is able to heal our daughter. Our question is not can He? But will He?. There are many different thoughts about faith and healing in the Christian world and many extremes in how people believe it all works. We know that it is through His power that He heals and nothing of ourselves yet there is an aspect of the faith of God’s people that is talked about in scripture that makes us wonder what it looks like to have reckless faith when it comes to our prayer for healing. Do we walk as if she is going to live? She is alive now and we are celebrating that, but there is a tension in that of knowing that these moments with her alive may just be that…moments. God led Kevin to John 14:12-14 this morning as he was praying about this question of healing and how should we be praying. Jesus says “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.” As Kevin read this to me, I wept and we both just prayed. We prayed through tears and longing to know God’s heart in this that God would heal our daughter (as we pray every night) and that He would help us understand faith, grow our faith, give us a right view of His power. We know that many of you are praying for a miracle for our little girl, please keep praying for that. We so desire for her to be with us for so much longer, and yet we desire that God would be glorified through whatever her story is. We want to pray with great faith, we want to lean on the one who is the HEALER. We want to know the Lord in ways that we don’t know Him now. Would you pray for us as we wrestle with this? Would you pray that we would grow in a deeper understanding of who God is in all of this, a deeper grasp of His mighty power and a greater depth in understanding the power of faith and what it looks like to pray in faith. We’d love to be praying for you to in the things that God is taking you through that are pulling at the heartstrings of your faith. It is so sweet to us to pray for others who are walking alongside of us and in the same way lifting us up in prayer, we’d like to lift you up to. There is no small detail in our lives that can not draw us to a right view of God and help us Know Him better. That is the sweetness of walking with Him.
- A Time to be Silent and a Time to Speak - October 29, 2020
- Teaching Them to Hope, Birthday After Birthday. - January 15, 2020
- A Taste of Hope Fulfilled – Briella Dawn’s Birth Story - August 3, 2018
