Sometimes the worst thing abut the situation is that I feel as if I'm in over my head. Why don't I have more skills in coping or helping? Sometimes I feel so useless. What does God expect from me? Why has God put me in the middle of a situation that seems so out of my league? Why am I and these people I love suffering so much?
So often life confronts us with people and situations that seem to need more help - physical, emotional, financial, even spiritual - than we have the resources to give. This leaves us in a painful, bewildering state of mind. Why am I in the middle of this? we cry out to God. Don't you have someone better for this job? Often we're angry because it seems as if the people involved in the situation - and that can include us - have no way out. Life can seem a waking nightmare. Especially if you're an insomniac and tend to wake up at 3 or 4 PM. Or you wonder in the morning if you've slept at all, and your stomach is still in painful knots.
Yet God is often an Undoer of Knots. I have to keep reminding myself of this. I have to keep reminding myself that I don't know the whole picture. That God doesn't choose perfectly skilled, professional people who know all the answers to do His work. That sometimes all He wants is for us to say "yes," even through we don't know how to swim. All He wants is for us to wade out into the mud and the murky water and flounder through it the best that we can, maybe even with a half-drowning doggie-paddle, and then He'll bring us out safe on the other side without us even knowing how we got across.
So much of life is a "make this up as you go" sort of thing. We might be responsible for people, but we sure as heck don't always know what's best for them. We cry a lot, we fume, we ask God to guide us, and then it's full speed ahead because we have to make decisions and take the consequences. We love as best as we can. We try to be patient. We try to be brave. We think that if we were God, we'd give us a lot more direction. But maybe God thinks He gives us all the direction that we need. That we're doing better than we think. That we're only seeing the darkness while He sees the moon and the stars.
We have to trust God with the people we love. We have to pray placing them in God's hands. We have to be realistic enough to know that no one gets though life without suffering. We can pray for them to have the strength to endure. We can pray that suffering will not make them or us bitter. That somehow love will deepen and soften all our souls in the long run.
Because there always is a long run. Life is not so much a dash as it is a long distance race. And God's eyes are always fixed on the farthest distance from us, on what this hard race will do for we His runners, in building our speed, our agility, our endurance, our strength.
If every morning we put our day in God's hands, if we ask Him to inspire us, strengthen us, guide us, we have to trust that He takes us at our word. The Holy Spirit is always promised to us - Wisdom, Counsel, Fortitude, Strength. This means that the Holy Spirit is our Pilot through troubled waters, our Navigator through cloudy skies. Our vision is too weak to see the right direction we should move in, but our Heavenly Guide can and does. God leads us where He wants us to go, to do what He knows that we can do, even if we don't know it. Because God knows us better than we know ourselves. And God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.
Humanly speaking, yes, we can and do make mistakes. But somehow, if we love and trust God, He will weave even our loose threads into His pattern. For He has promised us that He can and will bring all things to the good for those who love and trust Him. When we're having a night of insomnia, we can murmur to God that our eyes watch through the night to ponder this promise of His to do good for us. In the darkness, we can try to still our tangled screaming minds and hear God say these words to us
"Be still and know that I am God. I am the God Who promises you good. I will lift you up when you stumble in this hard race. I am Living Water when your soul thirsts, and Living Bread when your soul is dying of famine. Even when you are in the midst of the greatest tragedies, I am at your side. I will never leave you. I will always lead you and every situation in the right direction, even if it doesn't make sense to you at the time. All you have to do is trust Me - and say 'Yes.'"