One of the things that I have struggled the most in my life to wait for is a baby. When we were engaged, after mutual prayer and study, my husband and I were convicted that using birth control in our marriage was wrong. I've always loved children and was so excited to greet our first child in the near future. In with much of the research we'd done about contraception, there was also a lot of information about how long it takes most couples to conceive. I was so excited that according to most of what we read we would be pregnant within a year. Each month my hopes would build up. I hoped and sometimes even prayed that my period wouldn't come, that I would see those two pink lines on a home pregnancy test. As our first anniversary came and went, I was severely discouraged. God has asked for our obedience and we had given it fully hadn't we? Why wasn't I pregnant yet? Was there something wrong with us? Were children not a part of the future God had for us? These were all questions floating through my brain.
Finally, I realized that even though God didn't seem to have children for us right then, I needed to honor God in my waiting. I needed to entrust my desires to God, inundate myself with His word, and actively prepare for whatever future He had for us. I found so much peace in surrendering all my worries and desires to the Lord. (Not to say there weren't still those day's when I came before the Lord having to start all over. Some days it would seem there was a baby or pregnant woman everywhere I went and I would have to come before the Lord and ask Him to forgive me again for my anger towards Him and lay everything down at his feet.) Who was I to know better than Him when the best time was for us to be parents? I came to a place of acceptance. I knew that whatever the Lord had for us was going to be wonderful even if it wasn't exactly when or how I had envisioned it.
I've come to realize that while, I was waiting on God, He was also waiting on me. Waiting on me to be obedient, waiting for my unconditional surrender. Understand, I'm not saying when we are obedient or when we surrender it is like a magical formula to get exactly what we want. What I am saying is we can trust Him fully, and His ways are perfect in our lives. Though I did not always understand the why, I was and am reminded that I serve a God whose ways are vastly beyond my own. He is a God I can entrust with my own future and that of my family.
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are my ways your ways," declares the Lord. "As the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9
