I have two children. I have waited my whole life to be a mom, and being one is proving to be filled with even more joy, intense love, heartache and yearning over my kids, than anyone ever said it would be. But these are uncertain times. I don’t know what the future holds.
I pause and wonder: how many faithful parents in the history of time have peered into the future without a shadow of anxious yearning over their children, wishing they could offer a safer, purer world for their little ones to grow up in? How many have not been troubled by the effects of sin (turmoil, dissention, fighting, terror…) that seem to grow more visible every year?
I stand on the brink of my children’s’ existence on earth, wondering what the future holds, and tempted to fear for what they may encounter in their lifetime.
But I am reminded to stop and think: Who is this God in whom I trust? Is He limited in the grace He can show, or helpless in the power He can display in the lives of my children, or myself?
No indeed! And not only does the fact that I know my God is sovereign assure me of His ability to sustain my precious ones throughout their lives, but it gives me a clearer view of His nature…it helps me hold tighter to His character in a way that compels me to loosen my grip on the fleeting illusion of my own ultimate control over our circumstances.
Job 14:5 says that, “Since [man’s] days are determined, the number of his months is with You; and his limits You have set so that he cannot pass.” And Ps. 139:16 declares, “Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Your book were all written the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them.”
He chose to place my son and my daughter and any future children He blesses me with – and each one of us – on this earth TODAY.
Not only does He intercede for His people (Rom. 8:27), but He also chose them in Him before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4). And if I believe all these things from His word, in my mind it logically follows that God has not arbitrarily scattered human souls throughout history. This God of the minuscule and the mighty, who ordains our days, has chosen to place you and I, as well as our children, in this particular window of history.
Who knows if, like Esther, we will be given the task of faithfully risking our life to fulfill our specific calling? But I think we can know confidently that we have been placed on this earth “for such a time as this” (Esther 4:14). God does not babel, and is not random in His intentions. He has given us today. What are we going to do with it?
“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.
Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us, to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations forever and ever. Amen.”
(Eph.3:14-21)
By Aimee Mariani
