“Total surrender to the unannounced will of God”. (Charles Stanley, How to Handle Adversity) Wow. This is what it means to say “Thy will be done” & truly mean it. This sentence can mean a lot of different things, but to me it is totally a statement of trust. The journey that God set me on a year & a half ago has so been about trust. I’m not a personality that exercises faith & trust very easily. Some of that is because of hurtful experiences & some of it is just simply personality – I like the details & things need to make sense to me. However, when I got the diagnosis of Chondrosarcoma & was told the only treatment was to remove the entire right side of my pelvis with the tumor & amputate my right leg, it didn’t matter how many details the doctor gave me……nothing made sense to me. After the initial shock & tears & hugs, there were two words that kept going through my mind: trust me. I felt very strongly that God was telling me to trust Him & I realized at that moment that if I couldn’t trust God in this horrible situation, then I couldn’t trust Him about anything in my Christian life. If I couldn’t trust Him when He was saying that His grace is sufficient (2 Cor 12:9) & that He will use this for good (Rom 8:28) & for His glory (John 11:4), than how could I trust Him when he said that He gave His son for me, that He loves me & has forgiven me? (John 3:16) God says all of these things in His word, the Bible. And God’s Word is always truth, so I can’t pick & choose which things to believe. Either I trust God & His Word or I don’t. I am choosing to trust Him. It’s a daily – sometimes hourly – choice. Everyday I must make the choice to surrender my feelings & pain & circumstances in order to be a vessel that God can use to fulfill His purpose & will for my life. I know that God has a purpose for healing my cancer in this way, instead of by a divine miracle. I know that it is to bring Him glory, but I don’t know the specifics of how (hence, the “unannounced” part). I may never know much of how God uses my story, but He gives me glimpses now & then. Even though they have not yet come into relationship with God, I have seen family members soften to the things of God through conversations about my story. And, I have learned that when it says in Romans 8:28 that “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose”, it’s talking about what God considers “good”, not what we consider “good”. I would have considered being divinely healed & keeping my leg to be good. But, through this experience I have grown in faith & trust, my relationship with God has been strengthened, & I have had opportunity to share about God’s goodness with others – and that is what God considers good. And, after all, what God considers good is really the best kind of good! I certainly have a long way to go as far as total surrender, but each time that I make that choice to surrender, God has proven Himself trustworthy.
How about you? Are you picking & choosing which things to trust God with? Let me encourage you to make the choice to totally surrender to the announced will of God…..it’s not easy but so worth it!
