Keeping our hands open to God is easier when He is pouring blessings into them or even when He is entrusting something to you for a time. Where our hands begin to clench are during the times that He takes something that He allowed us to hold back. The hard part is that we forget that the things He entrusts us with are still His, He can take them back or do what He sees fit with them whenever He chooses to. What makes it worse is when we can see it coming. We beg and plead with Him hoping that He’ll see just how important this thing is to us and realize that we know ourselves and our needs better than He does and maybe, just maybe, He’ll relent. Or worse we question His love for us and His goodness because if He really loved us He would never take it away in the first place.
For the past two weeks I have been struggling with clenching my hands in the face of God, telling Him that He couldn’t take back any of the things that He had blessed me with.
It began with the idea of the potential for team changes at the end of the month at debrief. Then it was followed by finding out that someone that I was close to on my team was going to be leaving the Race for good. Then, I found out that my father almost died (he’s alright but the idea that he had almost passed away without me being able to find out for a few days shook me up). Add those things to leaving Peru at the end of the month and the people that I had come to love a lot… I was holding my fists tightly, shaking them in God’s direction so that He could see that I needed to be the one to hold onto them.
It wasn’t until immediately after finding out our new team members when our squad mentor, Greg, asked us to spend the following half an hour before God in regards to mourning our previous teams and rejoicing in our new teams that I finally came before God and asked Him the questions that I had been holding back for the past few days.
“Why do we have to change, God? There are still things that I need to learn from these women.”
“Why did You allow for her to leave? You knew that this is where she was supposed to be. I mean, You brought her here in the first place.”
“You cannot have him back yet. I’m still relearning how to love him better. This is the reason that I was worried about coming on the Race. You cannot have him back yet.”
“Why does it hurt so much to leave this church and these people? Take care of them. Don’t let us forget each other.”
It was there, on the rooftop in Lima, Peru, that I remembered what one of my college professors told my Spiritual Formation class three years ago. “With regards to God you need to keep your hands open. The things that He entrust you with are still His.”
I told Him “no” but as I sat there before Him in my hurt and frustration I remembered that He is the God of creation, the God that created the atmosphere and the tectonic plates…the God that sustains everything and that I am that girl that falls down while walking in the rain, that burns food when she cooks sometimes, the one that is so imperfect that she needed a Savior to come thousands of years before she was born. It was then that I decided that I needed to keep my hands open because while He entrusts me with some things in my life He is ultimately the one who sustains them.
Laughingly, I held my hands together and looked at how small they were in comparison to the ones that painted the night sky, the ones that were nailed to the cross. He entrusts me for a little time but He is the one that can care for them best. It was then, too, that I realized that because of the size of my hands (small) He had to take some things out of my grasp to entrust me with the next set of blessings, in this case my new team.
