March 30

“...they could have had no power at all against him unless God had permitted it, so I am able to look entirely away from “second causes” and to receive all that has come to us from the hands of God, and to say continually ‘Thy will be done.’”  Hannah Whitall Smith, Safe Within Your Love, pg. 120

I found myself struggling with something beyond my control and realizing I’d stopped trusting it to God’s care.  I spoke to the person involved and felt some release from my anxiety but I knew in my heart that this feeling of peace was temporary.  I knew I would take the matter back into my own hands--into my own heart--if this person did this thing again.  And then I read Hannah’s words she’d written in a letter in 1876 following her husband’s fall from public grace due to scandalous charges.  He was to never recover and died in 1898 a broken man.  Yet Hannah continued to write of God’s comfort and perfect will until her death in 1911.  This is what I was neglecting to see in my circumstance--that by thinking I must turn something over to the Lord I was denying the fact that God had permitted this thing in the first place and therefore it was never mine to begin with.  The burden I was feeling was one I’d taken upon myself.  My sin wasn’t in my inability to let it go, but in thinking it was mine at all.

“Cast your burden (what he has given you*) on the LORD, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.”  Psalm 55:22

*footnote in Harper Study Bible, RSV