Will you trust Me – for today and for tomorrow?

 It was a hot July evening in 2012, sitting on the grassy bank of a stream, as the evening light began to fade and the mosquitoes started making their presence known. It was a quiet place to think. A place to get away and alone with my thoughts... which, this particular evening, was a scary prospect.

I had been away from East Africa for a year now, yet I was still awaiting the morning I would wake without a heaviness in my chest and an ache in my heart of missing Africa with every fiber of my being. I was back in the States on purpose, to further my education, and prepare for a move to SE Asia. That had been the plan all along. At least, that had been my plan. In fact, I had spent the last year reminding myself of this. And I was no further along this evening than I was the first days of arriving "home" to American soil.

My heart was in knots. My spirit in turmoil. And to add to the plot, there was also this one guy... the one I kept resolutely factoring out of the equation when his name was whispered continually through my mind. After all, we were just friends. We were of different cultural, linguistic, and social backgrounds. We lived on different continents. We came from very different communities. And yet, my mind (and my heart) were continually drawn back to him. Despite all my denial, we were skyping on a weekly basis and corresponding even more frequently.

I was a mess. All my "well laid" plans and expectations were now a complex ball of limbo. Internally, I was battling fear of being my own worst enemy and making the wrong choices and the wrong decisions and royally messing everything up. So, that night on the bank of that stream, I was too consumed with swarms of fear and confusion and questions without answers to even heed the swarming bugs.

As I poured my heart out into a journal, hoping the verbal processing would bring some sort of order to my mental chaos, I wrote until I could no longer see the page through tears. I finally dropped the journal into the grass and cried out, "Why are You silent!? I NEED answers. I need to KNOW what You want me to do. I don't know, and I need to know. Why won't You just tell me??"

As the words faded into the buzz of mosquitoes, His voice gently flooded into my agonized spirit, "B, do you trust me for today?" Still in an attitude of frustration and impatience, I irreverently snapped back at Him that since it was already night time, that was a dumb question. Unfazed and ever patient, He whispered, "Ok then, will you trust me for tomorrow?" Realization flooded through me, that this was about to be a significant decision point. Mollified, I said yes. "That is all you need to know. Trust me, love." He finished tenderly.

Each morning following that evening encounter, He whispered the same two questions to me when I woke: "Do you trust me for today? Will you trust me for tomorrow?" He was asking me to surrender my need to know, my need to plan, my need for the answers... to, rather, trust Him, and His love, and His sovereignty, and His goodness and guidance. Yes, Lord, for today and for tomorrow, I will trust You.

And I discovered that in trusting Him--one day at a time, and walking in trust and obedience THAT day, and then the next day, and then the next--I found peace in His capable hands. He shifted my focus from the problems, the confusion, the limbo, the questions, to His heart.

Today, almost 3 years later, I am amazed to see what God has done with that simple trust. You know, that guy--the one on a different continent who I kept factoring OUT of the equation. He is now my husband. And I still wake up each morning with a love and ache for Africa, as I wake up on her soil;  she is now my home.

Linking up this week with The Grove @ Velvet Ashes.