Trusting God with my Babies

Yesterday I had a conversation with a good friend that I completely, “got”.  She was talking about the fear of taking her oldest child to start school outside of their home.  She has been homeschooling and is really torn about continuing at home, or letting her son start school.  Once we got down to it, her fear is not what you think of when you weigh the pro’s and con’s of homeschooling vs public/private schools.  The issue at hand is trust.  Trusting that the Lord will protect her son when he is out of her hands.  Not what you thought?  Me neither.  But I sooo get this struggle.  I have my personal corner table in this struggle room. 

When I had children I started to really wrastle with the Lord (yes, Im southern so we wrastle down here) with this very question.  He kept asking me, “Do you trust me with them?”  I skirted around this issue, answered some really nice Sunday school answer and moved on.  But, as my family continued to grow and more children were added I heard the question more and more frequently, “Do you trust Me?”  I finally had to answer.  Good thing I was answering in the privacy of my very own Jesus/Julia coffee shop that we have created at my kitchen table because if I had been anywhere else I might have answered it much, much nicer.  There it was, the thing that I had kept in my heart, the truthful, ugly, yuckiness that is me. 

“No.  I don’t trust that Your good is the same as my good for my children.  I don’t trust that You will keep them from harm, from hurting, from suffering.  I don’t trust that you will not allow bad things to happen for Your ultimate will.  So, my answer is No, no, no”.

He did not throw my coffee cup at my head, or walk away with his hands up in the air muttering frustration underneath his breath, he didn’t even give a look of shock and surprise at my overly blunt and ugly answer.   He spoke these simple words. 

 “Whoever preserves his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it”.  Luke 17:33

There it was.  The answer that I had feared so much, the whole reason I did not want to have this conversation in the first place.  I feared the truth that I knew would come.  But when He showed this verse to me, in his scripture it did not bring the fear that I had anticipated, it brought peace.  Peace because the answer is so simple and yet empoweringly fierce with the reality of truth. 

He will not promise me that my children will never hurt, never suffer, never lack for food or water, never face the hard reality that this world is a broken, shell of what it was meant to be in the beginning of time.  My children will walk this hard road because we are not home yet, we are not at the end of the race, we are in the dead-heat of running with perseverance of allowing suffering to produce endurance and endurance character and character hope.  And it is in the race, that they will find life.  I cannot preserve them from this world, I cannot lay my body over them and protect them from the world (oh how I would if I could), but I can trust that losing this life, handing it over to the Lord will preserve it.  How much more do I want them to know the Lord than I want them to be just….safe.  Safe.  It no longer holds the same value it once did.  

Hannah could not keep Samuel safe, she had to trust that the Lord would raise him.  Jochebed could not protect Moses with her own two hands, Elizabeth could not protect John the Baptist from death, Mary could not hang on the cross for her son either.  Jesus had to walk it and Mary had to let him. 

We have to allow our children to walk with the Lord, and trust that He has an ultimate plan for good not to harm for our children.  If we don’t allow them to walk and fall with Him, then we are standing in the way of their relationship with the Lord. 

So I give my children back to Him, because they have always been His….I just got overly possessive.  Knowing that they will have to lose their lives in order to preserve them.