I’m looking at the next several weeks and seeing a lot of stress, a lot of tasks, and a lot of questions. Conspicuously absent from the scene are energy, peacefulness, or answers.
But right now, this evening, one thing, one item several weeks out, looms huge. It glitters and gleams with a combination of dreadful uncertainty and huge potential. It seems like an opportunity presented to finalize some life directions, to drive home some lessons hard learned, and looks like a gift of closure for an unpleasant season of my life.
In some ways, those events and actions upcoming seem small. Not complicated. Fairly easily within my God-given abilities, and even pretty squarely in the middle of my strengths. And in a couple months they’ll all be behind me, memories fading into the collage of personal history.
But today… Today they loom huge. Like a beast on the path between me and home. I think about trying to back out. To call in favors and and just dump everything.
But I can’t.
Not from nobility, or commitment, or unwillingness to open my hand and let it go. That came earlier. I wanted to do it. And I realized i had to give that up, to sacrifice my desires and let God have it. But now we’re past that. It’s simply that giving it up and not doing it is not an option. This task is before me and all I see is that I have to do it.
And I am then battered by the realization that I can’t. No matter what I consider about how it fits into my abilities, the truth is, I can’t do it. But I can’t NOT do it.
And tonight, I find myself in that same position I was in 62 weeks ago: Crying out to God with the admission that “I can’t.” Not “please help me carry this,” or “I need help with this,” but the cold hard confession that I am completely helpless and have nothing to offer but emptiness. I cannot split the load with Him. It this load is going to budge He will be providing all the strength. I can only surrender, and ask Him to use me, to work through me.
And here, amidst a dozen other weights, pressures, and commitments squishing, pushing, and pulling, this one things stands out. I don’t know what will come of it. But I know that tonight will turn to tomorrow, and the days will march forward. And after enough of them troop past, I’ll stand before “This Thing”. And I don’t know what will happen, how it will happen, what and how God will work. But if I’m standing there it will be by His strength and my work will be by His provision.