When Help Arrives, but We Send It Packing

How often do we pray for help, but when it arrives, reject it and send it packing? Much more frequently than we’re even aware.

There’s a simple explanation for this: we think we know what the help should look like. When it comes in a form we don’t recognize, we assume God didn’t answer our cry.

I see this played out in my both my personal and professional life every day. I can’t tell you at how many kitchen tables I’ve sat and heard people complain that life is harder now that help has arrived. The family or individual wonders if anyone really heard them. They consider sending the help away and returning to the familiarity of their crisis-filled lives.

Sometimes we grow nostalgic for enslavement in Egypt, because freedom requires faith, fight, and facing the unknown.

Countless times, I’ve experienced this in my personal life. I devote intensive prayer to a situation of my own or a family members’ only to suddenly face a crisis of epic proportions or see my loved one filled with angst or enduring hardship. Did God ignore my cry? Does God not understand what we’re made of?

Of course, the fault lies in our response to the help God sends, not in God’s comprehension of what is necessary.

Following the Exodus from slavery under Pharaoh, many of the Israelites rejected God’s passage to freedom. It was hard, wearisome, lacking in comfort, and demanded faith.

After centuries of praying for Messiah to come, many religious leaders rejected Jesus because He preached a message of personal repentance that discomforted the comfortable and upset the status quo.

Families in crisis turn help away at the door becomes it arrives, not with large checks or transformative pills, but with challenges to expectations, requests to face hard truths, and painfully small steps of incremental change designed to redirect their ship the long way out of troubled waters.

In 2011, with my last child poised to graduate from home school, I dedicated myself to following Jesus into the next adventure. On 1/1/11, I started a Christian writers’ accountability group and asked God to use my writing for His glory. I thought I knew what that meant.

Within the month, we’d lost our home. My husband lost his health, and shortly thereafter, his job, but not before we moved into a “fixer-upper” he’d stripped of walls, floors, and ceilings. I was offered full-time work I didn’t want, and we now lived across from my parents so that family dynamics shifted like tectonic plates.

In the flash of a lightning strike, I went from being a stay-at-home homemaker with a writing dream to an empty nesting, full-time working woman who lived in an unforgiving wooden box, not a home. My dream of writing full-time seemed yanked out from under me as the day job and caregiving for family took precedence. I asked God for help and He sent me this?

To say I wept for a year is no exaggeration. To say my soul was as deconstructed as our new home is not hyperbole. To say I finally understood the Israelites who wanted to go back to Egypt, is just honest confession. To say God knew what He was about all along is eternal truth.

As I wept, I also prayed. I’ll spare you the narrative, it wasn’t always pretty, but God’s heard it all and He stuck with me. “How is help? How could this possibly be the way?” I cried. And He answered, “It is always the way to have no other home than my heart. It is always the way to receive the help I send. It is always the way to know that I am The Way and to follow only me, not the paths you imagine.”

Israel had been enslaved for so long in Egypt that freedom was almost too uncomfortable to bear. And with freedom, came choices, personal responsibility, conflict, and an entirely new dependence on God.

Jesus did not act like the Messiah Israel had long-imagined. The religious leaders were so focused on the oppressor they could see (Rome), they’d grown blind to the oppressor of all time who had worked his way into their very souls. Jesus wasn’t there to free them from Rome. Rome was nothing. He came to free them from what would keep them enslaved eternally.

In stripping the comforts of the life I knew, Jesus saved me from a hundred levels of self-righteousness and independence I didn’t see until He peeled them away. He wouldn’t be glorified by my words until they emerged from a heart that had returned to make its home in Him. To think I nearly ran from help, braces me now when it continues to arrive in unpleasant and unappealing forms.

This is the place where several Bible verses collide, and we must mature (just a bit) in our approach to our own lives and the lives of those we love.

Proverbs 3:5-8 says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. Be not wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord, and turn away from evil. It will be healing to your flesh and refreshment to your bones.”

In James 1:2-8 we are warned, “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.”

Cry out to God for help, for this is right. Know that He hears. Ask for wisdom to recognize this help when it arrives, even if it looks like trouble. Be careful not to send His help packing. Believe and see what God will do.

When help arrives, but we send it packing. https://t.co/oRpQjKt54f Why do we reject God’s help and what would happen if we didn’t? #Jesus #amwriting

— Lori Roeleveld (@lorisroeleveld) April 21, 2018