I’d just returned from a Christian Educator’s retreat in the Texas Hill Country. We’d slept in an eerie house uphill of the emerald, silty river protected by old cypress and oak trees, the Guadalupe. We’d been taught to write out scripture as prayers on notecards, to sign and date them – covenants.
I had baby on the brain. I’d been waiting since April for a positive pregnancy test. It was early August. Three months is not a long wait, but when you’ve got baby on the brain, even two weeks feels like two years. Back home, I gave covenant writing a shot. I wrote out Psalm 37:4, set the notecard bedside on my green shelf, and began to lesson plan.
By the end of the month, I was holding a positive pregnancy test.
I do not believe in magic formulas because God is not magical (in that sense), nor is he formulaic (in that sense). He’s not a math problem; he’s not a code to crack. There’s no poem to recite or spell to cast to guarantee a outcome. All I know is that I prayed with faith and surrendered my desires.
I prayed with faith and surrendered my desires.
I surrendered control. I dared to acknowledge that maybe babies weren’t a part of God’s plan for me. In those first weeks of pregnancy, I even acknowledged that God could at any moment take the blessing he’d given to me. (That acknowledgement alone calmed very real fears of miscarriage. Maybe someday I’ll say more about that.)
I am not saying that if you do exactly what I did, you’ll get exactly what you want. But what I am sharing is my story, and I can testify that God is faithful to give us the desires of our hearts when we delight in him. And do you want to know a secret?
He is our ultimate desire. Nothing satisfies like him.
Pregnancy excitement gives way to nausea and other unpleasantries. It can make us high and let us down. It’s the ultimate emotional roller coaster and it’s temporal. It has an expiration date, as do all dreams.
I almost delighted in the temporal last week. I almost had another Tucson. I had to stop and remember to pray with faith and surrender my desires.
The peace that followed my desicion to delight in the Lord instead of my desires freed me to dream daringly, expectantly, and without fear of the future.
Which is so much better than gripping white-knuckled to temporal desires with an anxious heart.
Trust me.
Life Out Here 