I awaken, stricken with fear.
It has been years since I felt this way. I lay in bed, willing myself to return to sleep, but my thoughts encircle like vultures, preying, waiting.
My lawyer, a lovely grandfather figure who volunteered to help Kitesong Global be set up in Singapore, had called me earlier that day.
He talks and talks. I listen, eyes glazed. I thank him gratefully. Without God’s word as an anchor, the world starts to warp.
I hold the rims of the world back in place with bare hands. Lights flicker.
At night I sleep. The enemy awakens me with worry. For the first time, I thought of the money we will no longer have, needed to support team members who need to be paid, who, like the rest of the world, need to eat, live, and grow. While dozens of volunteers help with various initiatives, not everything can run on free currency.
As the needs of vulnerable communities grow, Kitesong Global’s international work expands its reach to be established in Singapore as an entity. As we reach out to more students, patients and migrant workers, we need interns, and one to two staff to run programmes. I thought of the funding we had, when it would run out, the lives that depend on this- and feel my head swim.
I need to breathe.
I fall into an uncertain slumber, caught in the liminal space of sleep and wakefulness.
The next morning, as I play with my two little ones, my four-year firstborn whispers with glee into my ear, “I have a surprise for you for Mummy’s Day but I can’t tell you.”
She emphasises “Mummy” like the word is a gift in itself.
I try wearing my God lenses to see the world. And start to see that the gems I learn through motherhood are preparing me for this journey of faith.
In that like any step of faith we take with God and like raising children, there is risk. There is risk because we don’t know the future. There is fear because the uncertainty becomes unbearable. And when we yield to its vise, we desecrate holy moments of everyday life with thoughts of anxiety.
Cliff’s hands slide down my arm, bold, thick love. I start to tremble.
Years ago when we spoke of having children, my answer was no. If we pursued missions, it would be too risky. Likewise, years ago, when I felt the tug to set up Kitesong Global as a non-profit to grow the philanthropy/humanitarian work I was involved in, people said no.
“You’ll be responsible for legal fees, auditing, accounting, employing- there’s a lot at stake.”
A lot at stake. Is it too much?
Like in Homeschooling, too?
God’s words bring clarity, beckons us forward. We would have nothing, and help would come. Money, provision, legal advice, a word of prayer.
John Piper says, “ The tragic hypocrisy is that the enchantment of security lets us take risks every day for ourselves but paralyzes us from taking risks for others on the Calvary road of love. We are deluded and think that it may jeopardize a security that in fact does not even exist.”
So we hide and cower- we prefer to choose safer options of status quo to avoid rocking the boat. But what if choosing not to take risks for God is the greatest risk of all, what if that option, while predictable and viable and safe and comfortable, sits just precariously on the tightrope of just as many unknowns?
We think we know the future, that we’ve calculated it all correctly to make sound choices that fit our lives, but who knows what the future brings- all our attempts to keep our children safe and secure and happy and smart may end so differently, all our attempts to hoard and save and earn may end sour.
Safety is a myth. Success is a myth.
Security is a mirage.
And we would do better to realize that taking costly risks on the road of Calvary is probably the safest road of them all. It is as perilous as Queen Esther’s exclamation “If I perish, I perish,” yet as secure as God’s declaration, “I will rise again.”
I awake this morning with an unshakable burden to pray. My heart is the moon, drawing my knees to gravity. I pray for the lives that depend on our funding and programmes, the lives that need to be changed through our provision of employment for them. I pray for God to be real, to hear, to be as present for me as He is to our children when they pray.
For the past month, our firstborn has been asking us for a guitar. A guitar?! We aren’t even musical. Where from? What for? A whimsical request.
Like all of mine.
This morning, a miracle comes together. Light shifts my God lens and I see my child through His heart.
A discarded tissue box, an old shampoo box, bits of string.
Humble ingredients for a miracle- like five loaves and two fish, like the widow’s oil and her neighbor’s earthen jars, like water before it turned into wine.
I am reminded, how God uses the ordinary, the broken, the disenchanted to turn ashes for beauty.
The moon-weight in my heart sags and lifts. It is not mine. The burden lifts.
I feel a sense of relief. The kind of gasping relief that caresses your face as you emerge from underwater desperate for air. He has taken my burden.
Even in my unbelief, He is turning water into wine. It is happening, even when I cannot see it.
I am still on my knees. My phone rings, I jump. Who is calling. Can it be God Himself.
I pick the phone up, my knees shaky. It is a distant mentor. “Just felt to call you this morning, what’s going on with Kitesong.”
How did he know. My lips have been sealed.
We end in prayer.
I don’t have the funds. I don’t have answers. I don’t have courage.
But I have prayer. And prayer is the work.
Prayer is the greater work, says Oswald Chambers.
There were twelve basketfuls left over. All the jars were filled with oil, all the widow’s debt paid. There were six stone water jars, each holding twenty to thirty gallons, all filled to the brim with the best wine.
He provides for all our needs, and more. Will He not?
My firstborn is ecstatic with her guitar. It matters not that it is made of empty boxes and string. She cares not- it is glorious, astoundingly glorious. She strums it all morning, dances with it. It is what she wants and all she needs and more. She snuggles into my arm, “I love you Mummy, for making the guitar for me.”
My eyes water. This is the test.
THIS IS THE TEST.
We all think it is how much we achieve , how much we earn, how many people can afford to employ on our team, how much money we can make, how much funds we can raise that tests our faith.
It is not.
The real test is in the private battlefield of the mind and heart at three in the morning. It is the commitment to trust, the commitment to believe, the commitment to sleep because God’s burden is His, not mine.
This Mother’s Day, if you’re struggling with trusting God with your future, your children’s future, your team’s future- know this, He is there already. He was, has always been, and always will be.
