Don't just do something, stand there!!!

During the second world war, there was this lady called Cornelia Ten Boom. She was a Dutch Christian, and she harboured many Jews during the Holocaust, saving an estimated 800 of them. She never married, but lived with her dad and sister in the house that came to be known as "The hiding place". Anyway, that was hardly my point. Corrie, in the course of her endeavours, suffered so much loss, including that of her father who passed away ten days after their arrest and detention at the infamous concentration camps, as well as her sister, brother and nephew. She said:

Hold everything in your hands lightly, otherwise it hurts when God pries your fingers open.

Who better to say something like that to you than the woman who almost lost everything? Like the woman who sheltered Anne Frank, Corrie's family was rutted out to the Gestapo, who amazingly, never found the six Jews the family was sheltering at the time behind a false wall in Corrie's room. After hard times at the concentration camp, where her family died, she was set free in what turned out to be a clerical error on the part of the Gestapo, since all women her age were killed a week after she had been released. About which she only says, "There is no panic in heaven!! God has no problems, only plans". Seriously, how cool was that woman??!!
I've been reading this book Lady in Waiting by Jackie Kendall and Debbie Jones. Yes, it's about mariage and yes, I'm a little too young, but more than its being about marriage it's about my relationship with Christ. It's about becoming the right woman, becoming the Woman of Excellence God created me to be ASIDE from every other variable: husband, family et al. The biggest lesson I've learnt in that book is patience. We live in a world where all efforts are going towards getting everything now: microwaves, faster cars, faster planes, computers with more powerful processors and bigger RAMs so you can do everything simultaneously faster, faster internet, name it. And having been sucked in to this concept waiting is a foreign thing to me, yet the Bible is full of verses about waiting on the Lord, from Isa 40:31 to Lam 3:26-28 to many more.
But I think the only reason we don't want to wait, the only reason we'd rather be doing something to get us where we want to be is that we have believed the lie satan feeds us over and over again, "God helps those who helps themselves'. Probably one of the biggest heresies of all times. Where did He ever tell anyone, "Just do what you're able to, then I'll pick up from there"? There's this verse in Isaiah:

I am the LORD: that is My name: and My glory I will not give to another, neither My praise to graven images (42:8)

God's not going to kick in when you do what you can then reach your end. See, the glory's gotta be aaall His!! Corrie says that you can never learn that Christ is all you need until Christ is all you have. For as long as you have a fallback plan, God will let you work it. But as soon as you come to your end, and have done all you know to do and are stuck, with Him as your only option, that's the time He'll come through, proving Himself to you in ways you never even thought possible. But first, you've got to wait.You've got to stand still. And I think it takes more energy to stand still.  So we want to cling to our little treasure boxes, we want to gather around ourselves hoards of things that can 'give us security', so that in times of danger, we'll be alright. But that doesn't work either, it doesn't keep us when the rainy days come. The peace that Corrie had, the grace to forgive her father's killers and to give her food and time and kindness to the other prisoners in the camps, that didn't come from some storehouse within. She says (of the man who came to ask her for forgiveness concerning her father's death):

Even as the angry vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him....Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness....And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself.

The best thing you can ever do is to wait on the Lord. I'll conclude with another of Corrie's lines:

Dear Jesus...how foolish of me to have called for human help when You are here!!