flower delivery for May 27

Trusting?
copyright 2005, Lani Wiens
a fresh flowers original

Imagine the scent of a tightly closed flower bud. It’s hard to do because you can’t really capture the scent of the flower until it fully opens. That’s what my faith regarding all of this house business is like right now. I’m guarding my heart carefully and my faith has not exactly burst into bloom as of yet. Kelly told me I needed to write this struggle so that there would be a witness when God does what He’s going to do regarding our living accommodations. Yet another unusual flower in my garden, please bear with me.

God does not always answer prayers the way we think He should. I’m sure everyone knows that. Our last few weeks have given me sufficient evidence to firmly believe that. God is wild, not tame doing our bidding, but doing as He pleases. There are several scriptures that support that. In Proverbs it says, “Many are the plans of a man’s heart but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” We have an amazing tendency to believe that we are in control when in fact we are not. I love the verse in Acts 17 that states that God has planned the exact times and places where we will live. Isn’t that just mind-boggling? So where is my struggle?

Exhibit A: Kelly had heard from the Lord that we would conceive in March. We did. When I first started having difficulty the Lord assured us that the baby was okay, it was. When trouble kept coming I had no assurance that things would be fine in the way I thought fine to be. In fact I had had a feeling that things wouldn’t be ‘fine’ soon after I found out I was pregnant. We prayed fiercely, but our baby was gone. Things didn’t go the way we wanted them to.

Exhibit B: Kelly and I each heard individually from the Lord that we needed to pursue getting a dog. We laid out some very specific criteria about what kind of dog we would have. We prayed fiercely, we got exactly what we wanted. Things went the way we wanted them to.

Now here we want to buy our friend’s house, the bank system has been extremely slow in working out our financing therefore making things drag out to even put an offer on the house we want. We have to sell our house. We are convinced that we need to try selling it ourselves so that God will get the credit and not a real estate agent (though we have nothing against real estate agents, we don’t want to pay that high commission, we’d rather have that money go to paying off some debt). Real estate agents are telling us that we are crazy to try selling it ourselves and we really need their help. It’s tempting. It would probably be easier in some ways. We have a limited time frame that we’re working in. We know that if any of this happens it will be because God wants us to live in that other house.

So I struggle in my trust/faith. Will the outcome be like Exhibit A or B or will we have a C which is….who knows what? Kelly is convinced of what He believes He’s heard from the Lord. I feel a little out of control because I am! The message the Lord has been giving me all week is to trust Him. I’m not doing a very good job of that. So this ‘flower’ is a declaration of what we believe that God has said, that our house will get sold quickly and we’ll be able to move. I guess you and I will have to wait and see what the outcome is. We will continue to pray fiercely. These have been great lessons for the kids as they’ve been included in all our praying and have faithfully prayed for the dog, the baby and the house.

In the meantime I’ll be keeping my house in its current pristine condition in hopes that it will make a difference to someone who may want to buy our house. What will the fragrance of this flower be? I don’t know, I hope it will be pleasing and that we will have done what was asked of us. When it comes down to it, that’s all I want anyway.