Provider

By Heather Allen –

You do not like your job. He does not like his car. She does not like her yard. I really dislike my kitchen. Add the small things. Scuffed shoes, gray hair peeking out at the root, a belly where there once was toned muscle. Look in the mirror. Wrinkles, receding gums, loose skin. The discontentment builds. Pause to take inventory of what goals have been met, and the tally falls short. But the years are clipping along, sailing faster than it takes to get your life preserver on.

Maybe it is turning forty. Maybe it is having teenagers and remembering when my parents were forty. Mid-life crisis jokes are something we grow up with. We might smirk at the fifty-year-old who has decided to grow a ponytail, get an earring, and buy the Mustang he always wanted.

The only sense I can make of this bittersweet pilgrimage is in scripture. I turn to Psalm 84. “For the Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord will give grace and glory: no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly” (KJV, Psalm 84:11).

I keep reading.

“O Lord of hosts, blessed is the man that trusteth in thee” (KJV, Psalm 84:12).

“Define good,” I say to myself.

I meditate on the passage longer. Mentally I have re-worked it to read “no comfortable thing” rather than “no good thing.”

Costs are up. I weave a plan to compensate. I ask God to bless it. The plan unravels. I go back to the drawing board and ask God to look over the plan with me. I do not get a definitive answer. It comes out like this “it is good to wait for the Lord.” And for some reason this makes me cranky, from my gray roots to my chipping pink polished toes.

I start to analyze the situation. I narrow the problem down to my righteousness. Maybe I do not qualify for good things. Perhaps I have not walked uprightly enough. I start thinking about volunteer opportunities and supporting an orphan. And then in the quiet of my plotting a new more righteous course, I am softly reminded that my works will never qualify me for anything good. Verses packed with the truth flow from my lips as I remind myself that Christ is my righteousness. He came to save the lost because we could not save ourselves.

I ask my husband to walk with me. His quiet strength modeling meekness. God provides. Whether it is provisions or righteousness, He always provides.

And almost to punctuate this learning experience, the vise tightens. Expenses grow, the river floods, fishing trips cancel. My fisherman by trade glances at the rivers view from our back deck gauging the flows. I stand next to him, placing my shaky hand in his. He kisses me “trust God.” The river is swollen and muddy, and like all creation, in God’s hand.

I go back to Psalm 84 and think on verse twelve. “Blessed is the man that trusteth in thee.”

And while I am still uncomfortable, I know the truth. Trusting God means waiting on Him to use what looks bad, or scary, or hazy for my good. It means finding my safe spot in Him not in what I have stored up or can manufacture. It is choosing to believe God is love, when Satan tempts me, as he did Eve, to question His goodness toward me.

I choose to believe He does not withhold any good thing from His own.