Growth

Place Yourself in God’s Hands

This concludes a three-part series. You can read the other parts here and here.)

We talk a lot about things “happening” to us in life. We say things like “It was the luck of the draw” or “That’s just how it goes sometimes.” And there are a great many things in life that are outside of our control. We can’t determine when they will happen, if they will happen, and how bad they’ll be when they do happen. We just know that they do happen, and we have to respond to them.

For Christians, when the unexpected occurs, we are bound to say that “it’s all in God’s hands.” The statement is correct. After all, a sparrow doesn’t fall to the ground without our great God being aware of it. He controls the moon and the stars, causes the sun to rise each day, and is the only reason that we take another breath. So the inconveniences and the tragedies of our lives are definitely within His control. But we need to make sure we place ourselves in His hands too. We can’t just assign Him control for the events of the day, we must give Him control of our response and our lives.

This isn’t a passive thing. As I wrote about previously (here and here), recently I was standing in a hospital room as a friend was diagnosed with brain cancer and given only a short time to live.  Her response was to turn to her God in prayer – first to thank Him for all she had been given, and then to lift up others who needed His strength. The last thing that she did was to place herself in God’s hands. She immediately recognized that she needed to be firmly in His loving grasp – not trying to respond to this tragedy in her own strength, but to respond as a child wrapped in her Father’s embrace. She needed to be where He was, not in a passive sense, but to get her heart and her mind aligned with His.

It’s a discipline with which I think we often struggle. We are a society of independent, go-getters, and what we fail to recognize is that we’re dependent beings. We can’t handle the bad times or the good times on our own. We are nothing apart from God. Therefore, what we need to do is to put ourselves in His care – recognizing that not only are the things of this life safe in His hands – but so are we.


How would our response to things change if we were intent on placing ourselves in God’s hands?

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Being Content Growth

Give Thanks First

As children grow we try to teach them to use what I’ve dubbed their “polite words.” “Please” and “thank you” are necessary for social interactions and part of a child’s training is to learn when and how to use them. The challenge is that children are often only given these instructions when they want something, and then when they get something they want. We rarely teach children that when their desires aren’t fulfilled, they still need to give thanks.

This same habit we take into adulthood. We say “please” when we are making a request, and only say “thank you” when the request is fulfilled. Our gratitude is reactionary. It comes after we get what we want, and is presumably unnecessary if we don’t.

Yet God has already given us so much that even when He doesn’t grant our particular request, we have reason to give thanks.  Like our worship of Him, our gratitude isn’t contingent on our circumstances, but on Who He is and He is always good, always loving, and always working things out according to His purposes. Even when we don’t get our heart’s desire, we have reason to thank Him – for the gifts and the grace He has already bestowed.

It was a lesson I saw in action very recently. As I previously mentioned, a dear friend was recently diagnosed with brain cancer. The night of her diagnosis, as we waited in the hospital room, she suggested we pray. As she prayed, the first thing that she did was give thanks. Not merely a “thank you God for being God” but listing specific and particular things for which she was grateful. Her first response to God wasn’t one of anger or confusion, but of thanks. Her gratitude wasn’t based on the fact that she was laying in a hospital bed with an unknown future, but based on the fact that regardless of where she was, God was still on His throne. He was still faithful and still true, and she had much for which she could thank Him.

And so do we.

 

What are you thankful to God for?

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