Who's Really in Control? Surrendering the Need to Have All the Answers

Devotional week 28

"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight." — Proverbs 3:5–6 (NIV)

A few years ago, I lost both my parents within two years of each other. It was the kind of loss that shakes everything. Why now? Why like this? Where was God in it? I searched for answers and found that many of them were either not enough or not there at all. Someone once told me it is easier to have faith when the mountain is far away than when it is standing right in front of you. I understood exactly what that meant. By the time my father passed, I was not searching for answers anymore. I was just tired. And angry.

Last week, a dear friend of mine lost her father. As we spoke, she said quietly, "I have many questions for God, but I have no answers." Her words carried me straight back to my own journey, years ago, standing in that exact place. I still have questions today. Some of them, I suspect, will not be answered by this side of eternity. But somewhere along the way, I learned that faith was never meant to be about having every answer. Faith is about trusting the One who does, whether he chooses to explain himself to me.

This is what Solomon is writing about in Proverbs 3:5–6: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding."Our understanding fails us at exactly the moments we need it most — the diagnosis that makes no sense, the funeral we did not see coming, the year that took more than we thought we could give. Understanding is a good gift, but Solomon is honest about its limits. It was never built to carry the full weight of the hardest things we carry.

This kind of trust does not mean we stop asking why, and it does not mean we stop planning carefully or working hard at what is in front of us. This kind of trust is surrendering the need to have answers. When Solomon says, "In all your ways submit to him," he is inviting us to place every part of our lives into God's hands—our grief, our work, our future, our disappointments, and even our unanswered questions.

Challenge

This week, do not rush to resolve the question you have been carrying. Just name it honestly before God — in the exact anger or tiredness it comes wrapped in, if that is where you are — and ask him for grace to keep trusting him inside it

Prayer

Lord, there is much we do not understand, and some of it we have carried for a long time without answer. Teach us to lean less on what we can work out for ourselves and more on who you have shown yourself to be — in our homes, in our workplaces, in the places we still cannot see clearly. Amen.

By a tentmaker in Africa