She was a stranger, but I had seen enough of her heart that I wanted to know her better. Her journey through life had differed somewhat from mine, but the emotions, feelings, and thinking we had each carried were very similar. In the present, I was walking somewhat ahead of her because on my own journey, I had encountered a God whose essence was still holiness, but that holiness also embraced a love that longed to forgive, to relate, and to encourage. His love had become the oil that was bringing healing to my brokenness. The stranger and I emailed for weeks, just getting to know each other, sharing the valleys of our journeys, but sharing too the goodness of our God. Even though we were just emailing, as a friendship grew, I felt too I had taken her hand and her heart, and I was helping her to see God more clearly and accept more definitively His desire to be personally involved in her life. I spoke of our personal inadequacy, especially in the darkness of life’s valleys, but I encouraged her that God was still bigger, wholly dependable, and longing to love her in intimate ways. After numerous "eloquent, doctrinally sound" emails of affirmation coming from that journey that was bringing my own healing, she reached back to something she had once been told, "I can’t. God can. I will let Him." I was actually stunned. With just a few words, she had captured the truth God so much desires for all of us. I can’t. He can. I will let Him. We both literally reveled in the simplicity of truth that held so much. And as I reflected on all God had already done for me, I realized it had all happened within the context of I can’t, He can, I will let Him.
There was much in my life that had made me shout,"I can’t." The brokenness of my birth family. A dad I loved and cried out to in desperation, but he never came home. Institutional living, splotched with sexual sin and abuse. The death of our newborn daughter. Inner turmoil and anguish, shame and guilt. Wanting love and affection and finding nothing that fully satisfied. I was bad. I was responsible. I was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. I couldn’t fix anything. I had learned much of spiritual truth and I believed it for others, but for myself, it got stuck in my head, and very little got down to my heart. But God had not abandoned me. I was His child, although at the time, I questioned it. And the incredible love of the perfect Father reached out to me and helped me see how much He wanted to help. He accomplished a miracle of grace and I learned He could do what I had attempted to do by stuffing and ignoring and shaming myself, and then just trying really, really hard. But I could do nothing all by myself. I needed the affirmation of relationship with my heavenly Father. I needed to know how much He accepted me, how much He had already forgiven, how much He wanted to embrace and carry me, teach me and shape me into the woman He had already chosen to fulfill the potential He had for her. I could do none of that for myself, but He could, and I chose to let Him.
The answer is always with God. And we find that answer when we fully realize and appropriate, I can’t, God can, and I will let Him. In the suffocating darkness of loss. In the taunt of guilt and shame. In the cry to know someone really cares. In the dysfunction and brokenness of relationships. The answer can come in a myriad of ways, but it comes from God, and it comes within the context of I can’t, God can, and I will let Him.
– Bev
(Related Bible reading: Luke 7:36-50)
