There’s nothing scarier for a car owner. You’re traveling down the road and you hear an ambiguous noise. You know the one. The noise that happens intermittently as you’re driving blissfully alone. The one that strikes fear in your heart. Then, you don’t hear it for days and just as you’re lulled into a sense of complacency, it happens again.
You start to think you are hearing things. You ask your daughter, “Did you hear that weird pinging noise?!” She did, so you know you’re not losing your mind . . . at least in this case. You ask her to climb around in the back of the car in the parking lot, just to make sure there isn’t some strange animal in the car . . . you do live in the country after all. Nothing.
Days later you hop in your freezing-cold car and while it’s still warming up and you’re sitting at a light, there it is again! You turn off your heat, you turn off the car stereo, and strain to catch it . . . knowing you are going to have to drop the car off to your mechanic with a vague, “It’s making a strange pinging noise but only once in a while and very randomly. Good luck!”
After a week of pinging and plinking you drive cautiously, waiting for your axle to fall off or a stray squirrel to make its way out from under the backseat. Then a snowstorm comes and you decide this snowy day would be a good time to try out that new recipe you’ve created, which you envision looking so sweet packed in individual jars. So you ask your daughter to grab that flat of mason jars you’ve had in the back of the car for a week. She treks out through the mounds of cold snow and plops the flat of jars down on the warm kitchen counter . . . and as you turn to put the cupcakes in the oven, you hear it. The distinctive ping, ping, ping of a dozen mason jar lids clanging against each other—the sound of you saving $1,000 in car repairs and a whole lot of embarrassment!
Doesn’t it seem like life is a little that way? You find yourself worrying about a problem that doesn’t really exist. That friend who hasn’t called this week; is she upset with you about something? Your teenager isn’t communicating as much as usual (i.e., his “uh-huh” answers have turned to silence and you’re concerned); is she in trouble at school, or is he depressed? Too often we assume the worst when the reality turns out to be far better than what we were imagining. But what about when reality isn’t better than our fears?
If we had all the answers or lived without the many mysteries in this life, we would never draw close to or depend on Him.
It seems to me that the hardest situations to get through are those where there is no clear direction. We find ourselves in seasons in our lives when there seems to be a giant question mark hanging over our heads. I’ve often thought how much easier it would be if God would just make a big arrow appear in the sky pointing me toward the right answer. But, in His infinite wisdom, God knows that isn’t what is best for us. If we had all the answers or lived without the many mysteries in this life, we would never draw close to or depend on Him.
Charles Swindoll says, “We must cease striving and trust God to provide what He thinks is best and in whatever time He chooses to make it available. But this kind of trusting doesn’t come naturally. It’s a spiritual crisis of the will in which we must choose to exercise faith.” That seems easier said than done, right? Swindoll is acknowledging just how hard it really is when he refers to a “crisis of the will.” I have found in my own life that it is usually these moments of crisis that serve to strengthen my faith in God. Those are the times when I am going to be left with two choices. I can feel frustrated about not having all of the answers exactly how and when I want them. Or I can see the crisis as an opportunity to trust God and His timing in my life. When I choose the latter, what I find time and time again is that while I might not always like the outcome, it gets easier and easier to turn to Him first when a new challenge arises.
Imagine what would happen if we stopped trying so hard to figure everything out and took our cue from the sparrow in Matthew 10:31: “So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” The sparrow doesn’t wonder where its food will come from. It knows all of its needs will be provided for, just like God is waiting to provide for all of your needs and my needs.
After the winter there is always spring. There is always new growth and new life. There may be times when something is actually wrong, and just as we turn to our car mechanic to look under the hood and assess what repairs need to be made, we can turn to God to tell us where we need to go from here. But for those times when we are concerned about something we can’t pinpoint, let’s remember to cast our cares upon the One who desires to unburden us from stress and fear, and learn to rest in His provision!