My children often wait until I’m on the phone before they come up with things they just have to tell me right now. (Do yours do that?) Such was the case a few days ago when I was talking with a friend who’d moved to a city several hours away. I was sitting in my bedroom, on my bed, with the door closed, and Kenny still found me.
“Mommy, guess what?” he said.
“Just a minute, Kenny,” I said. “Mommy’s on the phone.” I made him wait several seconds while my friend and I came to a pause in the conversation. Kenny stood by patiently. “Okay, Kenny,” I said. “What do you need?”
“I just want to tell you I fixed my DS case,” he said. “It was split down the side, but I just used this.” He held up a roll of Scotch tape.
“Great, Kenny,” I said. “I’m glad you were able to fix it.”
“Oh, yes, ma’am, I was,” he said, heading for the door. He paused in the doorway to add, “Thanks to God and Scotch tape.”
When Kenny encounters a difficulty, he regularly prays for God to help him resolve it. I could just imagine a scene similar to others I have witnessed from Kenny in which Kenny knelt over the case with Scotch tape in hand, eyes closed, praying earnestly, “Please, God. Please help me fix this.”
I love Kenny’s understanding of what it takes to resolve a problem. (I also love that seeking God’s help has become a habit for him, but that’s a story for another week.) Kenny knows that when he encounters trouble, he should seek God, who cares about him and also happens to be all-powerful. He also knows that he needs to take action to help himself. Not action on his own, but with God’s help.
It would have been a less-than-best approach for Kenny to attempt the daunting task apart from God, that is, without asking God to help him. Likewise, it would have been wrong to ask God to help him fix the case, then sit there and wait for something to happen while refusing to act. Kenny understood what you and I need to understand, that usually we should do both—ask God’s help and be willing to put forth some effort ourselves.
It’s getting these two things in the proper balance that’s so difficult. Most of us tend toward one extreme or the other, either expecting God to just take care of things without our really having to do anything, or trying to fix a problem ourselves and only belatedly realizing we haven’t asked God’s help.
Those of us who tend toward the former are absolutely right in requesting God’s assistance, but we also need to be ready to work when He says, “Here’s how you can help yourself.” Those of us who tend toward the latter option are absolutely right that we need to be willing to work, but we should ask God’s help first rather than sometime later on.
Toward which extreme are you inclined? Are you more likely to feel paralyzed in your ability to act, or maybe hopeless that your actions could make a difference anyway? Or do you tend to find yourself calling a girlfriend, searching for answers on the internet, or realizing only after much exertion on your part that you haven’t even talked to God about the problem yet?
Either way, something needs to change. Usually, the right approach is one like Kenny’s—praying and then getting to work. Granted, there may be times when God fixes a problem completely apart from us, or when God helps us resolve a situation even when we haven’t talked to Him about it. But approaching the circumstances in either of those two ways presumes upon God’s grace. We can’t count on not having to lift a finger in our own behalf. Nor can we count on His blessing us in a certain way, especially when we’re full steam ahead on our own.
So if you, like me, find one of these approaches pretty natural, and even pretty frequent, ask God to help you change. Confess your sin to Him and tell Him you don’t want to presume upon His grace. But thank Him for that grace. For it’s only through His grace that anything at all will ever be resolved, no matter how that resolution comes about.
1 Kings 22:5—But Jehoshaphat also said to the king of Israel, “First seek the counsel of the LORD.”
Exodus 14:15—Then the LORD said to Moses, “Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on.”