REST

As I've said in an earlier blog, adopting an older child in our case means dealing with overstimulation constantly. Translation: she is pretty wild. When she's nervous, she's especially wild, and so I know its not comfortable or restful for her when she's acting like that. Because Collins has not gotten what she needs the first 5 years of her life, we are having to retrain her brain to: "Yes, someone will take care of me. I don’t have to be in charge. Yes, they will love me no matter what. Yes, somebody cares when I cry and they will come and try to meet my need. I can trust this person. They are trustworthy." So this cycle of trust has to be repeated over and over so that she learns she can trust us. She is safe now. Her needs matter to us. She is valued, loved and cared for. We are trustworthy. She can believe us, so FINALLY she can be calm on the inside. Its all okay now.

Inner rest is what this child needs. I can’t wait for her to heal on the inside so she can have that! And yet this is something we all aspire to, to have peace, to be at rest. As a parent, this is what I so desperately want for Collins, just as our heavenly father wants that for each of His children. He wants us at peace about ourselves and our circumstances because we are trusting in Him. In the LONG wait of this adoption, I put an index card in the front of my adoption file to give myself a truth just to battle discouragement. It quoted Jesus, "My peace I give to you..." and then underneath I wrote something I had read somewhere..."This is a peace that comes from looking into His face and realizing His undisturbedness." He wasn't disturbed by the long wait. Everything was right on schedule. He was giving His peace about the situation to me.

I recently taught on Psalm 95 and for this blog I'm sharing some of that message on this Collins blog because it was a spiritual lesson that has been fleshed out for me the past 8 weeks with her. Even more than that, these were truths that are heavily intertwined with my life story. This is long and hopefully not too preachy, but hey, what do you expect from the blog of 2 people who met at seminary?

In the last couple of verses of Psalm 95 the psalmist gives a warning about not having REST because of unbelief. In verses 8-11 he refers to the 40 year detour the children of Israel took because of their lack of trust in God as He led them along. Their murmuring and complaining and unbelief led to their exclusion from the promised land. This was the consequence of their lack of faith. These people had trust issues! But obviously we do too. It’s the natural fleshly default to not believe. Not trust. To forget what God has done for us in the past.

These verses in Psalm 95 are repeated in Heb. 3 and 4, a complicated passage but one whose theme is, you guessed it, REST.

What do I mean by REST? When you look at REST in the OT with Israel, rest was their inheritance. They didn’t get all that God had for them because they simply didn’t believe Him. Not obtaining rest for the Christian means failing to enter into all the blessings that could be ours (our inheritance) if we had faithfully trusted and obeyed God. That is startling to me, because I don’t want to miss ONE SINGLE thing that He has for me. For the Israelites, their blessing was limited. They didn’t receive all that God had for them, even though they were still His kids.

This can tie into rewards in heaven, but there is also our daily inheritance from God right now. His peace, His joy, His complete acceptance and love. Incredible riches in Christ are ours DAILY, that is our inheritance. Like Israel, we can forfeit that rest by just simply not believing God.

In fact you see this throughout the whole Bible. I don’t know if this sounds theologically sound, but as you read the Bible from cover to cover it seems that God’s problem or frustration is that His people repeatedly don’t believe Him. The people of Israel would see His mighty works over and over. They would experience His supernatural provision and care, and STILL they wouldn’t believe Him when the times got tough. Sometimes when reading their exhausting history you can feel like saying, “What a bunch of losers! Why couldn’t they see?” And yet, then I think of myself and my faltering faith. I think of the disciples in the New Testament. Jesus told them to their face what would happen, that He had to go through the cross and that He would rise again. But it's as if He had never said a word when it all came down. Maybe thats why He kept saying to them, “O ye of little faith.” This is the problem that God has with His people.

So here in Psalm 95 and in Hebrews, God warns us not to follow in that same path of unbelief. Our belief or trust is very important to God. Unbelief is such an enemy of His. Here’s an example: Let's say you really struggle with self worth. You don’t feel valued. God looks at you as I would look at Collins and say, “Wait! You are the most precious thing in the world to me! I’ve done everything to show it to you. Its all in the Scriptures, my son died for you, my creation is speaking it to you daily…” And yet maybe you’re just hobbling along. That’s limited blessing because you not reading or believing what He has said about you in His Word. He’s said it, it's all there, but you’re not experiencing the unbelievable freedom and joy His truths can bring to you. Heb 3:12 says see to it that you don’t have a sinful, unbelieving heart. I know I have spent many a day in the last 47 years on the unbelief side, not trusting Him for whatever struggles I was going through at the time. And for each of those days, I wasn't experiencing the inheritance I had as a child of His that day.

This has been the story of my life over and over. In every significant thing, He speaks and I have the choice to believe or not. Belief started for me when my home life was a little shaky, and I knew then that I wasn't building on anything again that could fall apart. After that, everything from waiting on Carl, my health, each of my children, and Orphan Ministry - these were all times where there was a crisis of belief.

They were each fierce training grounds of learning to walk by faith and not by sight. God did that in my life because that’s what His people are to do. We are those people, the Christians, those people who walk by faith. Scripture says the just shall live by faith. It is critical to Him that I trust Him. I understand that so much better now that I have Collins because I'm trying to earn her trust. I'm trying to get into her brain that I am HERE for her forever, that I will never leave her, there is nothing she could do to lose my love, she is my child! That she trust me is very important, and its given me a deeper understanding of why my belief in Him is so critical.

Let me close with this. Years ago we were really wrestling with this decision on whether to adopt or not. It really was a call to care for orphans and there were so many reasons not to do it. We are older, didn’t have the $, empty nest soon... But God spoke to me very clearly in a myriad of ways, one of which was Matthew 18:5. One of the other ways that was significant was in Acts when I was reading about the Macedonian vision. Paul was trying to go in one direction in his mission work and God prevented him. One night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia pleading with him, “Come to Macedonia and help us!” That was the orphans for me, come and help us! Clearly. So Paul went. As I was studying this I was blown away by the words of commentators on this specific moment in history.

“Authentic turning points in history are few. But surely among them that of the Macedonian vision ranks high. Because of Paul’s obedience at this point, the gospel went westward: and ultimately Europe and the Western world were evangelized. Christian response to the call of God is never a trivial thing. Indeed, as in this instance, great issues and untold blessings may depend on it.” soniclight.com

Great issues and untold blessings depend on me believing what God had said to me……for us that meant going all the way to China to get this little peanut. Let me tell you, 8 weeks in, it TERRIFIES me to think I could have missed this child. To think of her in that awful life. To think that I would have not been her mother! We have such abundance and laughter with her. To think that I would not have believed God, and I could have said, “No thanks. I know you’re speaking but this really doesn’t make sense, I'm scared, I can't see, so I'd rather not.” It's astounding to think that unbelief would have cost me one of the greatest blessings of my life.