Friday, April 13, 2012

trusting god for the water

A few nights ago, I was talking to one of my friends on Facebook. He's currently stationed overseas for his job, and we talk often about different stuff--usually writerly things, and occasionally we stray into more Biblical matters. This night, I was telling him about my deadlines and how they stress me out, and he made a very interesting analogy.

When I was fundraising for China, it was relatively easy. I mean, there were still times when I was tearing my hair out, thinking, God, this isn't going to work. But it always came, and I was fully funded days before my trip. But this time around, for Romania, I'm finding it infinitely more difficult, for whatever reason. To contrast these two, I needed $6,000 for China. For this trip, I'm needing about $2,500. Big difference there.

This friend, Travis, likened my struggle to that of the Israelites while they were wandering in the desert. They had no water. They'd run out. And here they stood, shouting at God and Moses and each other and anybody else who'd sit still long enough to be yelled at. Crossing the Red Sea had been so easy! Had God brought them here just so he could starve them? Was this really His will--for them to wander in this forsaken wilderness and slowly get dried up to death?

Of course, we know how that ended: Moses struck the rock as God had told him, and water came out. Maybe God's simply making me wait for my rock. (I do wish he wouldn't, but if there's one thing I've learned about God, it's that he doesn't particularly care about my wants most of the time.)

- Kyla Denae

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