Shaina believes me.   When we learned about fossils and the Grand Canyon in home-school this week, she asked, “Is this a true story, Mommy?”   We oohed and aahed at pictures on the internet, and I told her that not only was it a true story, I hoped to take her there some day!   Later we hunted through the yard with magnifying glasses, enjoying the 50 degree sunny weather and hunting for fossils.  

We found some... shapes of shells pressed into rocks.   What fun!   As we sorted through piles of rocks, Shaina commented, “Oh look, I see little dinosaur bones!”   Okay, so she’s a little zealous when it comes to being a budding rock expert.   Then came this observation, “Look at this one, it’s made out of the Grand Canyon.”   And she matter-of-factly set it aside to keep hunting.  

She was right, it looked like the grand canyon in the internet pictures, reddish with layers of sediment.  I wasn’t struck by her powers of observation, however.    It was her trust.   On the very basis of my word, she had accepted my fanciful story of this huge hole in the earth, and she was willing to base her current existence on my promise of this place.   If the Grand Canyon is real, why couldn’t this rock be from there.   Okay, so there’s the matter of many hundreds of miles.... really, she doesn’t have the complete picture.   But she trusts me.

And I felt my Heavenly Father’s meaningful gaze... “Are you learning something here?”   What happened to taking Him at His Word?   Trusting that if He said it was so... it was!   We give ourselves such license to cheekily cross-examine the Almighty!   Especially when He interrupts a very happy life with what our eyes deem a tragedy.   What happened to trust?   Where now is faith?   What if I can’t reconcile all of the details... can I still trust?

No, I’m not saying we should be mindless robots... the garden of Eden proves to us that this is not why we were created.   I don’t want that from Shaina... my trusting little 5 year old.   I want her to grow and question and learn - and blossom as a result.   But I’m honored by her trust.   “And without faith it is impossible to please God....”   I’m not so sure all of our questioning leads to blossoming... atrophy seems more the fruit I see.   Nathan and I have talked recently of the sin of allowing circumstances to bully what we know to be true about God.   We’ve both been guilty.

I came across a poem in Streams in the Desert that I had memorized more than a decade ago.   There is a statement within it that has become my unspoken mantra... I say it to myself often in a day, and constantly in dark nights of the soul.   “I am quietly holding fast to the things that cannot fail.”  

In that same devotion (March 5) the statement is profoundly made.  “The greatest challenge in receiving great things from God is holding on for the last half hour.”

In the bitter waves of woe

    Beaten and tossed about

By the sullen winds that blow

   From the desolate shores of doubt,

Where the anchors that faith has cast

   Are dragging in the gale,

I am quietly holding fast

   To the things that cannot fail.

And fierce though the fiends may fight,

   And long though the angels hide,

I know that truth and right

   Have the universe on their side;

And that somewhere beyond the stars

   Is a love that is better than fate.

When the night unlocks her bars

   I will see Him - and I will wait.