By Lisa Wilmore
Greetings, Dear Hearts!
I thank God for you today and send blessings your way. By His grace and mercy, we are given another opportunity to see this blessed day and share words of encouragement through this avenue.
In that spirit, one of my favorite books for practical encouragement is Harris Faulkner’s Faith Still Moves Mountains: Miraculous Stories of the Healing Power of Prayer. She reveals some of the most fascinating stories of how God comes alongside of us in our daily lives and helps us through tough times.
With this in mind, sometimes life places us in situations that feel overwhelming, and uncertainties are too strong to fathom next steps, which, in fact, validates that as humans, our understanding is limited. We may not understand certain aspects of God’s will for our lives, but He understands what we cannot. Without question, God’s ways and thoughts are above ours as stated in Isaiah 55:8-9, and some things we will not understand in this life as we journey through our earthly walk. He sees the bigger picture, the hidden paths, and the outcomes we cannot imagine.
Faulkner’s Faith Still Moves Mountains shares a powerful example of what God understands what we cannot. In this book, she records an incident where two students who were enjoying a senior skip day decided to swim across a dangerous inlet (bay) on the Atlantic Coast. They were quickly caught up in turbulent waters and became exhausted and terrified. They were too far to swim back to shore and had no strength left to move ahead. In their moment of desperation, they cried out to God, and by His grace, a nearby yacht named Amen was there at the perfect time to rescue them from tragedy.
Dear Hearts, this story reminds us that even when we cannot see what God is doing, we can trust that He loves us and is working it out on our behalf. He orchestrated the boat, “Amen”, to be positioned perfectly in time to rescue the swimmers. This is what God did for us through Jesus Christ, while we were yet sinners. Scripture reminds us “… God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8 KJV). He was purposefully positioned for God’s plan to rescue us from our ultimate death.
Our job is to trust, to pray, and to keep faith, knowing that He can carry us through life’s valleys, whether there is disappointment, loneliness, anxiety, or danger, etc. Proverbs 3:5‑6 (KJV) declares that we must “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.” When we remember that “God understands what we cannot”, we find courage in uncertainty and peace in the midst of our troubles. Life’s situations are real, but so is His grace.
