Mrs. O 🌸

We spend much of life trying to hold things together with our own hands. We hold plans, people, possessions, reputation, health, ministry, and the future as though our grip can keep them safe. Then life teaches us what Scripture had already said: we are far weaker than we imagined, and many things we love can be taken from us without asking our permission. Job understood this in the hardest possible way. He lost what he could not replace, yet he still said, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away. Blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21). Faith did not make the loss unreal. It taught him whose hands had always been underneath his own. This is why surrender to God must never be confused with a guarantee that He will preserve everything we surrender in the form we prefer. Abraham placed Isaac before God, and Hebrews tells us that he trusted God even with the possibility of death because he believed God was able to raise the dead (Hebrews 11:17–19). His confidence was deeper than keeping Isaac close. His confidence was in God Himself. Paul speaks with the same certainty near the end of his life: “I know whom I have believed and I am convinced that He is able to guard what I have entrusted to Him until that day” (2 Timothy 1:12). That is where the Christian finally rests. Our security is not in the strength of our grip, but in the faithfulness of the One to whom we belong. Furthermore, Jesus warned us about spending our lives gathering treasures that moth, rust, thieves, sickness, time, and death can reach. He told us to lay up treasure in heaven, where none of those things can destroy it (Matthew 6:19–20). Much of what we clutch will eventually leave our hands. That is simply the truth about living in a dying world. But what has been surrendered to God in faith is never meaningless. Our obedience is not wasted. Our suffering is not wasted. Our labour in the Lord is “not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58). Even when God removes something precious, He has not lost control of it, and He has not lost control of us. We will eventually open our hands whether we want to or not. Death makes sure of that. Wisdom is learning to open them before death forces them open, and to trust the God whose hands never fail.