Sunday Devotional: Beyond "I Can"

I can’t do this.

So many times over the course of my life, those words have whispered through my mind. Sometimes they’ve even crossed my lips.

During a particularly hard year in my teens, trying to navigate life, the universe, and my own too-intense nature.

The loneliness of the last semester at college, awash in delayed grieving over my dad’s death.

The difficulties which always come during marriage, with a husband who seemed so obliviously happy, I didn’t feel I could talk to him.

In childbirth, during transition, that most awful part of labor just before the glad work of pushing.

Facing the possibility of a child who would be medically fragile his whole life—and then with the reality of having to relinquish him completely.

Rearing and schooling a houseful of very strong-willed and active children, often in the midst of military separations and later, the grief of losing one of their siblings.

In the long, long journey as a writer, during the years before that first coveted contract.

Now, dealing with a husband mostly overseas, uncertainty in regards to where we might wind up living, oldest child graduating from college, oldest daughter planning a wedding, youngest child still learning how to read, and God nudging me to step forward in a handful of areas.

I can’t do this.

So many times I’ve stepped out in faith, or what I thought was faith, only to have the thing falter and fail and crumble to nothing. I don’t want my life to be a string of nothings.

At last, after many years of saying I can’t, and knowing it was truth, I stopped and asked the Lord—why did You lead me on this path if I couldn’t do it?

And He whispers to me, So you would always be reminded that you need me.

The words echo inside me. Why would I need that reminder? I already know I need Him!

But do I really? Pride is a lifelong enemy. Would I not truly become puffed with my own importance, my own capability, if I had better apparent “success” in walking this journey?

And then, the next time I’m in a crisis, I find myself saying it again.

I can’t do this.

The Lord responds, You’re right. You can’t. But—I can, through you.

In my heart of hearts, I kneel, humbled, overwhelmed that He would choose me, that He’d think I’m a fit vessel for His Spirit and His work. Oh Lord, what is mankind, that You would set Your love upon us—upon me?

And then comes the process of surrender—because for a stone-cold will like mine, it always seems to mean breaking, and crushing, and being chiseled into something I don’t even recognize, before I can finally accept that He is God, and He’s good, and His plan is so far beyond anything I could imagine, let alone see as the thing of wonder He intends it to be.

In the process, I learn that I myself am meant to be a thing of wonder as well. “You must be so strong,” someone said to me just the other day.

No. Oh, no. I lost count of the times I’ve said “I can’t.” But I’m also learning that He can. The Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead can take a soul once drowning in despair and bitterness and raise it, too, to life.

And then ... I can.

From Psalm 18, NKJV:

²⁸ For You will light my lamp;
The Lord my God will enlighten my darkness.
²⁹ For by You I can run against a troop,
By my God I can leap over a wall.
³⁰ As for God, His way is perfect;
The word of the Lord is proven;
He is a shield to all who trust in Him.

³¹ For who is God, except the Lord?
And who is a rock, except our God?
³² It is God who arms me with strength,
And makes my way perfect.

(This post appeared February 3, 2013, as my first devotional here at The Borrowed Book.)