God Can Find a Way...

There are times in our lives when we look ahead and simply do not see how we will make it through the next few days. I am writing these words at just such a time. You should be reading them when I am in the airplane and on my way to the USA. Between now and then are three days. One of them will be "wasted" traveling back home to Singapore from Chiang Mai. The other two will be fully utilized to get the last things done that I need to before leaving Singapore. I don't know how I am going to get everything done that needs to get done. But it will happen somehow, and Lord willing I will be on the plane, and all of this will be behind me when you read these words. I am looking forward to that moment with great anticipation.... and I am looking forward with even greater anticipation to many hours later when I will disembark in St Louis and once again be with my best friend, Gwen.

But for now I am overwhelmed and don't see how I will get from here to there.

We spent a morning earlier this week during our Sharpening Your Interpersonal Skills workshop looking at stress and how it impacts us. Stress is cumulative, and so all the little details do add up. Add in a couple of big ticket items (like getting some additional audit papers done for our annual Singapore company audit) and my stress level is into the red zone. In my head I know that I will just get one thing done at a time until everything gets taken care of. In my head I understand that when you are reading this I will probably be sleeping somewhere over the Pacific, with a clean slate and everything nicely sorted out. My head sometimes doesn't manage my emotions very well though, so I wonder how I will sleep in the mean time!

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to share from Luke 22:39-46. In this passage we see that the Lord Jesus Christ was under huge stress as He anticipated what He would have to go through during the next few days. He would have known in His head that three or four days later He would be safely on the other side, but the horror that He would have to go through in the mean time was more than anything you or I could even imagine. He pled with the Father to find some other way. He prayed so hard that He sweat as it were great drops of blood. He agonized over the upcoming events as He spent time with His Father in the garden. But we know that He accepted the Father's will and because of that joy that He knew would be His when everything was said and done, He endured the cross, despised the shame and is now sitting at the right hand of the Father as our savior, our advocate and our High Priest.

At times like now my heart needs to be reassured that whatever happens in the next few days I will be okay. I need to be reminded that there is someone who loves me more than I can understand - who chose to go through a much more difficult time than I ever will have to - and who knows me and still loves me unconditionally. Nothing that I do or don't do in the next three days will impact that love or my relationship with Him. I may fail in a number of ways during the next three days, and I may be very frustrated with myself as a result. But I can rest in Him emotionally and spiritually, just as I anticipate being able to rest physically once I am on the plane.

And of course, after I get off the plane in St Louis, and after I greet my best friend and the love of my life, we will have another whole set of "impossible" circumstances that we will be facing together. And we will remind each other that He is faithful who has called us! We can't do it all sometimes, but He always can, and He's always with us!