NOT YET........

It is heartbreaking to see someone that you love going down the wrong path, a path that you know is NOT God-ordained!  Maybe they are in bondage to drugs or alcohol or living an immoral life or maybe they are just spiritually estranged from God.  But you KNOW that God has so much more for them, yet they seem to be totally blind to it.  Maybe you have prayed and prayed and yet it appears that nothing is happening, that God is just not listening.

Appearances can be deceiving!  Just because we see no evidence of it from our perspective, it does not mean that God is not working.  God works in mysterious ways.  His ways are not our ways.  And, He is not on our time frame.  God has a way of weaving seemingly insignificant circumstances into a miraculous outcome.  We just have to trust Him to do it in His time and in His way.  That is the hard part.

A dear friend gave me a devotional for CHRISTmas called 31 Days of Praise by Ruth Myers.  It provides a devotional of things to praise God for each day of the month.  I love it!  One of my favorite days says:

"Thank you that You plan to use for good the struggles my loved ones face---including their disappointing choices, their unwise or even harmful ways of thinking and living, and their sidetracks from going Your way....I praise You in advance for the part these difficult things are going to play in Your good plan for us---in eventual deliverance and growth and fruitfulness.  I'm grateful that in all these things, the battle is not mine but Yours...and that the final chapter has not yet been written."

Those are encouraging words to me.  God IS working.  Even if I do not see it, He IS working!  What's more we can rest in the fact that God does all things well.  (Mark 7: 37) We must not lose hope.  Rather we must remember God's promises to us and trust Him even when we cannot SEE what He is doing.  Isn't that the very essence of faith?

An entry in Streams in the Desert puts it this way:

"There are degrees to faith.  At one stage of Christian experience we cannot believe unless we have some sign or some great manifestation of feeling.  We feel our fleece, like Gideon, and if it is wet we are willing to trust God.....It marks quite an advance in faith when we trust God without feelings.  It is blessed to believe without having any emotion.  There is the third stage of faith which even transcends that of Gideon and his fleece....this third form of faith believes God and His Word when circumstances, emotions, appearances, people and human reason all urge to the contrary. "

Yes, we must learn to trust God to do what only He can do in the lives of those we love even when we see no evidence that He IS working.  We must trust that the final chapter is NOT YET written.  As our former pastor, Rick Gering, once said "There are some chapters in our life over which God writes WILL EXPLAIN LATER," but in the mean time we wait and we trust and we believe that God IS working, God WILL break through and God WILL use it all of His glory!!