By Misty Umholtz

It is probably safe to say that most of us are walking through something. Whether that be something in our marriage, with our kids or another close relationship, maybe it is with our job, our health or our finances. We might think, if we could just get this one thing taken care of, life would be so good. Better yet, if God would just take care of this one problem area in our lives, then I could tell everyone how Good He is for answering my prayers! So, why won’t He just answer my prayers so I can give Him glory and we can all move on from this?

 

My husband and I have been walking through some things in the area of my health for the past several years. I had a major surgery last March to take care of the problem and we thought we would finally be done with it. But the post-surgery recovery has proved to be daunting and on-going. It's been a rough and steep road headed back to full health. For every setback along the way, I have hoped that within the year, all of this will be behind us.

 

Next month, I will be at my one year mark... What if we are not done walking through this? What then? What are we going to do? It’s not like I can just give up and quit trying to get back to feeling normal again. We don’t really have many choices other than to keep walking through it until we are out of it. It seems to always take longer than we think it should to walk through trials, doesn’t it? Most of the time, we don’t have many options in what God has chosen for us to walk through but we do have a choice in how we walk through them.


We can gripe and complain or we can find things to be thankful for in the midst of the pain. We can feel sorry for ourselves and compare our lives to others or we can find moments of beauty and enjoyment in the midst of the mess. We can blame God and throw a hissy fit or we can trust Him in the midst of confusion. We can take the chance of throwing Him aside and going it alone or we can allow God to teach us and grow us in whatever He is trying to reveal to us.

 

I have to stop and ask myself a question; Do I want God to just answer all my prayer requests or do I want to personally know that He is the Answer to everything? I mean to really KNOW Him, to feel Him and sense Him and hear Him and touch Him, to experience Him and have encounters with Him on a daily basis. It is usually in the midst of our stuff that we're going through that we find Him in the most profound way. It's there that He meets us and changes us and molds us and refines us in the deepest part of who we are.

 

Whatever He has put in our paths for us to walk through will be used by Him.  As much as we would like to fly over the problem or scoot around it or just plain run away from it, the Lord is asking us to keep walking through it with Him, together, hand in hand until we get to the other side, for however long He decides it will take.