Trust Him in Your Wilderness
How to overcome your unbelief
I sat blankly staring at the computer screen to fill in another registration form. My hands shook as my heart sank when I read what I had feared after submission, “registration for this property is already full.” It had been a month since we had started house-hunting; we were staying in a small Airbnb in the countryside, and the days that we were to move out were fast approaching. God, where are you? The past months had been an insanely chaotic and challenging time, and the end was nowhere in sight. I asked myself, how can I trust a God in such a painful time when I don’t see hope in the situation?
Joseph Times
Then the story of Joseph (Genesis 37–50) came to me through a sermon. Joseph’s life had started great with a Promise that He would someday rule and even his family would bow down to him. Instead, however, things took a gnarly turn when his brothers sold him into slavery because of jealousy.
Though he was a slave in Egypt, he rose to prominence in the house of a crucial government employee of Pharoah. Finally, the man caught some break, but not to have all his hopes dashed, when he got thrown unjustly into prison because the commander’s wife wanted to seduce him, and he rebuffed her.
Lord, going from bad to worse, got stuck in prison for years.
You’d think he would’ve been a bitter young man by then after more than a decade in slavery and also three years in prison. However, when the story picks up in prison, he meets a baker and a cupbearer who both have strange dreams requiring interpretation. Joseph could’ve told them, “absolutely not,” I’ve suffered enough at the Lord’s hands, but he chose to interpret them while still testifying of God’s power.
I don’t know if I would’ve had the faithfulness to do that after so many challenges and heartaches, but Joseph did. He asked them to remember him when they got out, but the cupbearer forgot about him for three years. Joseph remained faithful, though, and carried on with his duties in prison while he waited on God’s promises to be fulfilled in his life.
He waited on the Lord until the Pharaoh had a dream one night that no one in the Kingdom could interpret. The royal cupbearer who had been in prison with Joseph then remembered Joseph’s abilities to interpret dreams, so he was promptly readied and summoned to the Pharoah.
After years of injustice, slavery, and torment, Joseph interprets the dream, and Pharoah makes him the second in command in the Kingdom ( Vice-Pharoah has a nice ring to it). He gets a wife, riches, and power to rule just like God promised him. The story ends with his family bowing to him unknowingly because they thought he was dead and buried by that time. He is reunited with his family and the Promise is fulfilled.
Growing into Faith
After listening to Joseph’s story and meditating on all that he had gone through, all the while remaining faithful, my faith began to grow again. To me, the choices I had were few; either I trusted God and watched him do a miracle in a tight housing market, or I could continue to worry myself sick about the situation, which didn’t change a thing. Then, after choosing to trust God, lo and behold, God opened up an opportunity to view a 3-bedroom townhouse with a garden and an attic after the house viewing had already wrapped.
It seemed impossible, but God had given us favor with the landlord, and after a few days of intense back and forth, he agreed to rent us the house after so many people had come before us. That is purely God and His way of providing to a specific need out of His glorious riches.
“Those times when you feel like quitting can be times of great opportunity, for God uses your troubles to help you grow.” — Warren Wiersbe.
There have been many times I’ve wanted to throw in the towel because of hard times, challenging circumstances, and awful behavior of people, but God’s promises were fulfilled right on time. He came through for me with the house, He came through and delivered me from people who tried to keep me down and embroiled in drama, He came through on a situation where I was unfairly treated at work by a manager. God will come through for us if we diligently seek Him and trust Him with all our hearts.
Part of waiting for the significant Promise to manifest in our lives is to trust and rely confidently on the Lord with all our hearts. He created us for the goodness He has put in this life. He’s our Creator and has the blueprint for our lives all thought out. He has His storehouses full of what we need (Phil 4:19), yet we need to depend on Him entirely, and He promised us that He would provide for us when we ask (Mark 11:24). All we need to do is hope in the Lord and ask him to bring to us what His Shalom (complete peace) can only accomplish in our lives.
Lamentation 3:26 — The Message
It’s a good thing to quietly hope, quietly hope for help from God. It’s a good thing (when you’re young) to stick it out through the hard times.
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