Last week I wrote a really transparent blog because I was really going through it mentally. I wrote that post after spending an hour on social media seeing several engagement posts, posts about new employment, posts about vacations, and posts about all the loveliness of others’ lives. I could afford to rejoice with them but I found myself looking at all that was on my timeline and wondering “Will [this] happen for me?” And then I felt horrible for not being grateful for the imperfect and emotional, yet pretty darn good, life I have.
In the midst of all that, I was preparing to speak at a Women’s Conference at my church that I did not necessarily want to speak at (but who can say no to my Mom?). I contributed my heightened emotional state to bad nerves and the weight of the message I was to speak about – the power of words. So even as I was preparing to tell women to beware of the power of words and how they can and do hurt, I wrote a blog that thinly veiled my pessimism about my own future.
I kept going over women’s narratives in the Bible because you know, there are enough women’s narratives in the Bible from which I could pick. My mind kept going over different women I could talk about within the context of the presentation and it still felt like something was missing.
And then Sarah dropped in my mind. Yes, that Sarah. Abraham’s Sarah. The Sarah who was told she would conceive past her childbearing years. The Sarah who laughed when she heard the news.
(Source: gifsoup.com)
I think people have been pretty unfair to Sarah concerning this story. The reality is – how many of us women if told years after menopause that we would conceive a child, would believe it? Would our reactions be much different? I know for sure I would have laughed and it would not have been a little chuckle – it would have one of those gut-busting laughs because…unbelievable.
And yet a year later, it happened for her. God’s promise remained intact, despite her inability to believe that it could still happen for her. Remember, this was after she told her maid to go in with her husband and conceive so that he could have children. That surely backfired. So by this time, Sarah had pretty much settled in that her life probably would not include this. And yet, beyond the midnight hour, God speaks “by this time next year…”
Sarah laughed and there was probably so much behind that laugh. Years of prayers and tears, years of hopes and wishes, knowing how many things she tried to get to that point, that little small voice that was probably saying “But what if it doesn’t…?” And maybe that was what drove her to lie and say that she didn’t laugh when she was asked why she laughed. But here are the things…
1. Reactions and emotions are natural and God knows that.
2. God is not deaf to our cries and our desires – even if He doesn’t allow fulfillment to come the way we would expect.3. Is there anything too hard for God?
So I had to tell myself is to not throw myself out of the race before it even starts. I think beyond worrying about what will happen for me and what may not happen, what’s more important is how I work on me. There are certain things about myself which should remain constant, whether I find myself checking every goal off my “Completed” list or whether I don’t see half of them come to fruition. And as I ended the blog last week, it is still my goal to be OK either way – I’m just not using my overall health as an excuse to not keep pushing for what I want.
(Source: thirtyoneministries.com)
