Romania has not been what I expected in any way, but as
we’ve been working at a camp helping them prepare for the summer with small
garden and painting projects, I’ve been learning more and more about
dependence. In the funniest ways, God is proving that he is absolutely reliable
and that nothing is to be feared in letting go of anything that seems more
important than he is.
For example, he’s used my affinity for desserts and coffee. The
story goes like this.
Here on the World Race, every girl
knows that the only proper way to cope with her exponentially expanding
waistline and her new diet of bread and pasta with extra potatoes on the side
is to cry to her friends and walk to the nearest market to buy them out of
whatever packaged cookies they have available. The boys are learning not to
point out the glaring inconsistencies in our reasoning in this area.
I had one such pack of cookies,
and only two were left.
In my head I had been fantasizing
all day long about finishing these precious cookies after dinner with a
delicious cup of instant coffee during team time. I was going to make the
coffee, grab the cookies, snuggle into a chair with my favorite blanket and
dunk the sugared delicacies into the steaming, caramel-colored ambrosia of the
gods until they were just the right kind of soggy on the outside without losing
their inner crunch; my life was going to be perfect. As complicated as I can
be, I’m really easily pleased in this way; just a cuppa, a cookie and a
blanket, and I’m ready to face pretty much anything.
Well, also here on the World Race,
everyone knows that you just don’t leave these cookies lying around in the
common area of your house. You just don’t. The night before I had been an
exemplary Christian with an abundance mentality about these cookies and shared
them with my team while we watched a movie together, and I foolishly left them
in the common room overnight like a month-one-Racer. Amateur move.
I should’ve known better.
Surely enough, I mixed my coffee
and walked upstairs to where I’d left them last, and my cookies were nowhere to
be found. After frantically combing the room looking something like an
over-stimulated dog looking for a buried tennis ball in a pile of dirt, I
looked in the place I had purposefully avoided – the trash can – and my worst
fear came true.
There in the trash lay the wrapper
to my sweet treats.
I let the reality sink in as I
listened to the lingering echo of my bubble popping. Someone had eaten my
cookies. My last two cookies. The cookies I had bought with my money and
already been willing to share.
Coffee in hand and tears about to
fall (the tears might just be for dramatic effect), it was all wrong. Nothing
had gone the way I had been planning. The cookies were gone. The coffee was too
hot to sip. And it was cursed instant coffee, which I had known it would be,
but this stuff makes Maxwell House seem like an appropriate espresso in an
urban coffee shop full of hipsters. It is a new kind of bad, a solid 9.5 on a
scale of one to repulsive, and the bad seemed particularly magnified in light
of my loss.
I walked upstairs and sat on my
bed, waiting for my coffee to cool down and staring at the floor, forlorn. It
was such a small thing, the loss of these two cookies, but most of my day had
been spent looking forward to them and now I had nothing.
In my head, I sort of gave up my
control of the situation with an exhale and told God how disappointed I was but
decided that it was okay. I want to be the kind of person who shares at all
times and truly lives a life of abundance, even if it means the last of my
cookies, and I recognized my opportunity to learn.
Jokingly and in my purposefully
dramatic and over-the-top despair (because I really didn’t care that much), I prayed a simple prayer out
loud.
God, I really want some cookies. Could I
please have some cookies?
I was laughing and my friend
Jolene was laughing at me, but part of me was serious. I really did want
cookies, and somewhere along the way in this lesson on dependence I’ve learned
to start asking God to provide anything he wants and giving him the opportunity
to surprise me while increasing my faith in the process.
No sooner had the words left my
mouth than Cassy and Mindy walked in the room, and having overheard my prayer,
both of them went to their packs and pulled out a sweet for me from their own
personal stashes (I told you, we all cope the same way).
Boom, just like that, two sweets
in my hand.
Mine had been eaten, but God had
provided.
All at once I was overjoyed and
tickled to death and kind of freaked out that God had actually answered a
prayer for cookies. It was one of those moments where you know you’ve always
believed in God, but he comes through so radically that you find yourself going,
“Whoa… he does exist,” kind of like
the M&M’s say to Santa Claus in the Christmas commercial.
Still in awe, I ate the cookies
like I hadn’t eaten in days and gave sincere thanks while they were on their
way down. We all headed to team time and I felt especially cared for by a God
who would delight in giving me something as silly as dessert.
But the story doesn’t end there.
At the end of our time together,
my friend Jan, the guy who is doing the entire Race with no personal money and
who I’ve never seen purchase a single thing, said he had something to say. He
launched into a speech about being thankful that we have occasionally blessed
him and bought him things and been mindful of the fact that he has chosen not
to have money,
and so to thank us had brought us cookies.
I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more
divinely loved in a single moment. Just because of silly, $0.50 packages of
cookies.
As he pulled three packages of the
scrumptious treats from his front pockets, my mouth was gaping. In my head, I
was baffled as to where he had even gotten money to buy these cookies. I have
never seen Jan even eat a cookie, much less buy some for other people.
But I knew.
I knew that Jan had gotten those
cookies because Someone had already known that I would want them that night,
and that special Someone cares enough to completely outdo what I had planned for
myself all day.
The moment we abandon our expectations and
our ideas of what will be best for us is the moment that we allow God to
actually be God in our lives. And in his fullness God will never disappoint us if we will be patient and wait for him to do what he’s best at doing.
He always has more for us – even in the simple things – when we let him be who he
is. The biggest victories we will have ironically come from our willingness to
surrender, because in reality, we cannot be victorious on our own.
Such
a simple lesson.
I
had two cookies that I had to give up.
God
had four (and a half) that he had to give me.
m
