As I was driving back home from dropping the kids off at school this morning, I noticed Secondary School girls being dropped off for school and a memory of my childhood flashed past me.
I started to recall how being made to take the public bus to school by myself at an early age and walking to the coffee shop at the age of 6 or 7 all by myself to buy bread, had allowed a spirit of independence and pride to form which I was not aware of till I met God.
I look at my own daughters now and would not think it safe to allow them to go walk into the streets on their own at an early age but given my own mother’s upbringing, she felt that it was good to allow her children to be independent. Unknowingly, this early “independence” sowed a lie in my heart growing up – that I had to fend for myself and that my parents did not really love me, that they would allow me to be put in such dangerous situations of being potentially kidnapped or lost in public.
When I started to learn of God as my Father after entering into a personal relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit, I realized that I had found it hard to ask for help. I was always used to doing things for myself and it had been ingrained into my belief system that you simply get what you work for – if you don’t do it for yourself, no one will do it for you.
I had accepted it in my head and parts of my hearts, that adoption into “sonship” was through the blood of Jesus and not by any of my own merits but had trouble really coming to God as a Father that would protect and provide for me as I did not feel safe or provided for by my own earthly parents growing up.
This affected the kind of prayers that I would pray because I never really asked for help and dared to trust God fully. I would think up the solutions and then pray that it would happen the way I had asked because I felt like it was up to me to decided the outcome by brainstorming what would be the best way forward.
In the last 7 years of becoming a parent myself, God patiently revealed His Heart of a loving Father to me. Through many “disappointments” and hard seasons, he revealed to me how I could full entirely trust in HIM. His Will be done, His Kingdom Come – and that as a loving Father and God himself, He had the best plans for me – even when I could not see it at the point of time.
Today the words” I will never leave you or forsake you and the Lord himself will go before you” ( Duet 31) was repeating in my heart when I thought back to my childhood as a little 7 year old girl crossing the street and walking to the coffeeshop to buy bread alone and even now 30 years later… that whenever I thought I was alone, the Lord Himself is actually with me- closer than the air that I breathe.
I now have a bold confidence because I have the Holy Spirit, the spirit of God himself dwelling within me – but not an independence apart from God – for in and of myself, I can do nothing if I don’t remain IN HIM. ( John 15).
‘It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.” ‘-Deuteronomy 31:8
“I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing”. – John 15:5 ESV
“I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
Philippians 4:13 ESV
“yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.”
1 Corinthians 8:6 ESV
Hadassah Lau 