Day 24 - Issue 24
Psalm 89:11 NLT
'The heavens are yours, and the earth is yours; everything in the world is yours – you created it all.'
In unstable times, it is inevitable that each of us looks for something on which we can build trust and confidence. Some lay hold of politics, others save money against what we call ‘a rainy day’. The list is endless. I had placed my trust and confidence in a loving, life-long relationship with the woman of my dreams. Yet, no matter how hard I tried, I was unable to prevent that love slipping through my fingers. The cruel ravages of MS were finally too great a hurdle for Katey’s immune system to conquer.
“This is my wife!” I yelled at a deaf deity. All my hopes were invested in that love and now I was left with just my fears. The silence that accompanies death lasts long beyond the lingering notes accompanying the coffin’s final journey into the crematorium oven; life so vibrant when filled with love; so empty and cold once that love has dissipated.
It was almost cruel, too hard to bear and believe that God was somehow in this arrangement. As time passed, I was able to reflect upon how Katey’s early departure to glory had exposed where I’d placed my trust and confidence. It was in her, in our relationship, in our most wonderful marriage. Yet, this was only ever a micro world of our own creation. We may well have been God’s gift to each other, yet how quickly we turned our eyes away from God. We began to build a world born of our own imagination, with every expectation that God approved. Had we ever asked? Not once.
The silence was time and space for me to recalibrate my understanding. The world was God’s and I but God’s servant within it. I struggled with the practice of placing my trust in God’s capability. My head affirmed this was God’s world. My emotions and reactions told a very different story. Slowly I learned that life is about transferring all of my trust onto God. No hedging of bets, no carefully crafted human fall-back plan.
QUESTION: Where is your trust and confidence invested?
PRAYER: Lord, my Rock, show me where I need to trust in you alone.
