Lean Not on Your Insufficient, Limited Understanding

I love the times when I'm paying close enough attention to life's little details to actually get out of them what God is trying so hard to show me.

Last night, my German friend, Daniela, and her 1-year-old son, Owen, spent the night because today was Owen's 1st birthday and she recruited me to help her make the cake. Long story short . . . when we were leaving my place today to go to the birthday party, she made a trip out to her car with some stuff and left Owen with me for a few minutes until she came back and we could all leave for the party together. Well, Owen being only exactly 12 months old, didn't have the mental capacity to understand that his mother was, of course, coming right back to get him. All he knew was that she had walked out and left him with some tall, strange Ausländer (foreigner). (At this point in our relationship, he knows me only as the person who has a ceiling fan. Every time his mom brings him to my apartment, he immediately fixates his gaze to the thing going round and round above him. Germans don't have ceiling fans.)

So, his mom walked out of the building and he started to cry. Natural response. Babies do this. But as I was holding him and telling him that everything was okay - that his Mama would be right back - I realized something: The times in life that I cry are usually the times in which I am leaning on my insufficient, limited understanding. There have been so many times in 2007 when I have been just like Owen - crying because I don't understand; because I can't possibly comprehend that the hurt that I'm feeling is unnecessary. No one is hurting me or attempting to snatch away what I love. I'm hurting only because I am refusing to trust God.

God is to me what I was to Owen today. I was holding him tight and reminding him that there's no need to cry. He's safe in my arms and regardless of whether his Mama comes back or not (which of course she did), no harm is going to come to him unless I allow it. And the only way I would allow him to hurt at all would be because it would ultimately bring him good that could not have been bestowed on him in any other way.

Dramatic story, but all that to echo the words of a verse I've clung to my whole life: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding." Why? Because our understanding is as feeble as Owen's.