In My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers said, “It’s easy to say, ‘Fret not,’ but a very different thing to have such a disposition that you find yourself able not to fret. It sounds so easy to talk about…‘waiting patiently for Him’ until the nest is upset—until we live, as so many are doing, in tumult and anguish, is it possible then to rest in the Lord?…Resting in the Lord does not depend on external circumstances at all, but on your relationship to God Himself. Fussing always ends in sin. Fretting springs from a determination to get our own way. Our Lord never worried and He was never anxious because He was not ‘out’ to realize His own idea; He was ‘out’ to realize God’s ideas.” What food for thought that is for all of us, and for many of us as we walk the journey of special needs.
It certainly is easy to tell others and even ourselves not to fret, but the reality is that when we are waiting upon a health test result, for a prodigal to come home, for an answer to some problem in our life, for our child with special needs to accomplish a simple (to us) task, well…it’s just plain hard not to fret in our humanness. We so desire to put our full trust and faith in the Lord, and to rely on Him in such a way that we really are “waiting patiently.” We recognize that our posture is to be such that it’s not the external circumstances, but our relationship with God that makes all the difference.
We fuss and fret, which shows we are thinking of ourselves. We need help to put all of our dependence and reliance on Jesus. That isn’t a gift, but a skill that we develop over time—over and over and over—as we practice it. We need help and practice to not be about our own way and ideas, but about Jesus, as He works in and through our lives. We don’t want to be the one who “wants our own way,” but the reality is we so easily slip into that mode of thinking and acting, because it’s so familiar to us.
As we become familiar with coming to the Lord, seeking Him, serving Him and growing in Him, we don’t fall back to our selfish and self-seeking ways. We know it’s part of our growing closer to the Lord, so we need to identify when we are fussing and fretting, and not letting Jesus be our all-in-all.
It’s a hard journey. Jesus can help us.
