Entry for December 17, 2008 - "Quit Trying to Figure It Out"

I met with my lay counselor again the next morning. A few days before this meeting, out youth pastor and his wife spoke at church. This was their last day. They spoke again of a crisis of faith and hope deferred. In summary, our youth pastor's wife spoke of how the last few years of their lives God had put her through an olive press. She illustrated how like an olive in the press that you squeeze to get only a little bit of oil, God had been "squeezing" her. It takes pressing many olives to get the olive oil, and it had taken many years for God to bring about the "olive oil" of her life, so to speak. The pressing and squeezing can be very painful. They were now seeing the fulfilling of God promises and visions in their lives. I remember sitting in the back of the church silently weeping. This is where I was in my life in the situation I was in. I felt like God was squeezing me and squeezing me, but there was so little coming out, and I did not know where He was taking me next. My heart was breaking all over again.

This time when I met with my lay counselor, I shared this with her, and that I felt maybe God wanted something from me, instead of having something for me. As I was getting ready to leave her house that morning, she said that she had a word for me from God. She said maybe God wanted me to quit trying to figure it out.

I laughed, and she responded that this must have struck a cord with me. I confirmed that it did. I had spent the last several weeks trying to figure out what I could have done differently, how the situation could have been avoided, and on and on. God wanted me to quit doing that, to just rest in Him.

So, for the first time in two months, I returned home with a sense of peace I had not felt before. Every time I started trying to figure it out, I would stop myself, give it back to God, and make a conscious, yet difficult, effort to move on. Three days later, the day before Mother's Day, I was at finally at peace.

I awoke that morning feeling like I could finally move on in my life. I still did not know what God had meant by wait, but I could finally rest in His peace, knowing that He had all the answers, and I could still trust Him with my life and my broken heart. I was ready to pack away the baby things and start my life anew, so to speak.

And then the call came unexpectedly. On the other end of the line was a voice I had not heard for two months. "Can you come get him? I can't do this." I could go into all the details of what happened next, the trip to her home to pick him up, the conversations that pursued, but it all ended with the answer to what God meant when he said to wait.

It was the day before Mother's Day, and I had my baby boy in my arms at last. He was almost two months old, but ironically it was the week of his due date. She signed the papers four days later, and it was done.

God fulfilled His promise in this, at just the moment He had always intended to fulfill it. And He had done some work in me that has left me forever changed in my faith and how I see things, and how I hear from Him.

We had a few more ups and downs in our relationship with birthmom before we were able to get to a place of reconciliation, but at this point that relationship has been healed in ways I could not have imagined. I can only give credit for that to God.

In the end, He did what He said, not in the way I expected, but in the way He needed to for me to grow. I could not have written this chapter in my life so well.

Don't we serve an awesome God?