A few days after my family moved me home from school this summer my dad lost his job. Seventeen years of commitment to a job and the company decided to restructure without my dad's position in the picture. My immediate reaction was tears and frustration for my dad and for our family. Often our identity gets wrapped up in things like where we live and the careers we have. It felt like a piece of our identity was shattered, robbed from us. It was that feeling of having that clean, aesthetically pleasing, seemingly trustworthy rug pulled out from under you. It goes so fast that you are on your back, breathless, before you realize it is gone. As my parent's daughter, and as a daughter of Christ, I know that individually and collectively, our family's identity is found in Christ. And my parents have known that and lived as an example of that throughout this summer.
This summer, through the experience with my Dad's job, God has helped me to refocus where I look for my identity. He has also taught me about His faithfulness and His perfect timing.
God's Faithfulness: Prayer
I come from a family of diligent prayers. We pray together and we pray for each other. We each take turns praying throughout the week at our dinner table. When my mom would pray she would lift up prayers from the day, for joys and hardships for others. Then she would end the prayer with ..."God, we need a job. Amen." She was honest with God, and she spoke from her heart. That is what we all would pray, together and separately.
Often, I would feel overwhelmed with stress during the day, and sit down to pray. I found myself one day saying "God, I know you know what my family needs. What my dad needs. A job. Please bring us to a place where we are comfortable again."
I lifted up my prayers, and then if reflection, I thought, why am I asking God to make me comfortable? At the beginning of the summer, I was preparing a message to give at camp, sharing with others about how God is a God who knows exactly what we need. And I needed to trust Him. I needed to trust that God had a plan, and that that plan may not mean comfort like I envisioned it.
Comfort is great, but our walk with God is about stepping outside of the places we are comfortable. I sat back and realized that there are people living every day outside of my definition of comfort. It is humbling - when you think you have so little, there is always someone praying for an ounce of what you are taking for granted.
So I looked at the places where I needed to grow, and I looked at the places where I needed to let go. I needed to let God take control of the everything - of the job search, of my family. God, you know what my family needs, help me to trust You.
God's Faithfulness: Community
When something tremendous, like job loss occurs, and you are expecting God to respond by planting money trees outside your front door, you will hopefully learn that God is far more creative and far more intentional than that. What will happen is that you will open your door, and you will find friends, and friends of friends.
It is incredible and humbling how many people stepped forth to help my dad and our family throughout this summer. God provided peace there in so many ways. He used the hands and feet of others to change our lives and to bring us hope. Whether it was reading resumes, making connections or prayer, God provided.
My family and I could never express our gratitude enough to everyone that showed God's love and grace to us this summer. You all are living proof that God works and God moves. That God knows what we need, and that He sends a flood of community.
God's Timing
Often when I hear people talk about God's timing, I take it as a euphemism - it's like a gentle way of saying that you'll be waiting a while. That is what we begin to think: when we truly submit something to God and release it from our timeline, we assume that it will be a long time before God works. We feel like this because we are impatient, and we are stuck in linear time.
But God has moments ordained - perfectly ordained. He is an author and He pens in the details perfectly. I imagined that it could be any amount of time before my dad found a job again. Knowing how the job market is at present, and how common it is for someone to be out of a job I was preparing myself to be waiting for some time - months, or upwards of a year.
In early July, God blessed my dad with a new job. It is a new chapter opened in our lives the God has just begun writing.
Don't Worry
This is a verse that I leaned on during this summer:
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry
about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what
you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than
clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If
that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and
tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you
of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Matthew 6:25-34
God provides. It is not easy to trust, but He will help us with that too.
~SP
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