Psalm 121:4 says that our God neither slumbers nor sleeps. I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, it was always easier to fall asleep knowing my dad was awake and sitting out in the living room with the light on. Even more so, your heavenly father is ALWAYS awake, so you can go ahead and rest peacefully knowing that He is not only awake, but He loves you and is watching over you. Can you trust Him to handle things while you’re sleeping? He holds every single day of your life in His hands and NOTHING can snatch you from the Father’s hands!(John 10:29). Next time you can’t sleep, remind yourself that God holds your life in His hands; He has you engraved on His palms (Isaiah 49:16).

I was speaking with a friend this morning about a mission trip he recently returned from. He & his wife talked about the disgust for how ‘we’ try to Americanize other cultures by bringing people in need our money and gifts. Its as if we throw an offering their way and carry on with our day. And what does that teach people? Well, it creates ‘beggers’ for one. Children have caught on to the ‘missionized’ way of life, thus they cling to foreigners for the things that will turn prosperity for their families. But I believe really what we’ve done is tried to ‘humanize’ other cultures, just as we ‘humanize’ each other.

In today’s fast pace, platonic way of living, when someone is in need, don’t we jump to this conclusion that ‘stuff’ will fix it? Money, a house, a car, maybe just a bag of groceries, if we could just provide these things for someone in need, we’d be helping them out. But think about it… as a creation in God’s image, it’s not really more ‘stuff’ our hearts are yearning or longing for. Our Heavenly Father, the model for our design, doesn’t want the ‘good works’ and things we can give over to Him. God longs for us to spend time with Him, to desire sharing our lives with Him. And as His children, we too have been born with this innate longing at the core of every need we have. We were created for relationship with each other… to have others long to spend time with us, to desire sharing their lives with us. And yet, there’s this perceived lack of time that prevents us from doing this each other, just as it hinders us from also sitting down with God.

Just as we don’t seek God only for His blessings, the hearts of people in need aren’t seeking us only for what we can tangibly provide. We seek God to know Him… that is how we show love and faithfulness to our Heavenly Father. With this example we have been given, we must understand that at the core of a person’s greatest need is simply a longing from their heart for us to get to know them; a desire for us to listen, understand, sympathize, hurt and grieve, rejoice and share in the seasons of life. We need to recognize the parallel this concept shares between our relationship with each other and our relationship with God.

“A mingling of sweetness and sorrow. The sweetness so outweighs the sorrow that I have no desire to dwell on the pain. The root is deep, the covenant solid, the love is sweet. Life is hard, but God is good.

I want to be astoundingly enabled to labor on through sorrow, accomplishing more than would ever have seemed possible in a single lifetime. And people will say ‘only by God’ as they give Him all the glory and praise.” John Piper

God told us He would grant spiritual gifts. They can not be earned or merited, they are bestowed by God and are actual manifestations of the Spirit and have nothing to do with a person’s ‘giftedness’. This is different from the anointing He grants to us all. 1 Corinthians, Romans, Ephesians and 1 Peter all speak to the natural and miraculous spiritual gifts the Holy Spirit empowers us with. But the caveat to spiritual gifts is that they do not benefit us, they are only instilled to benefit others. While Paul did not list all the spiritual gifts, those he did share can be categorized as “gifts of knowledge” (word of wisdom, word of knowledge, distinguishing between spirits), “gifts of speech” (tongues, interpretation, prophecy), and “gifts of power” (faith, healing, miracles).

Since the age of 13, I have recognized the spiritual gift of knowledge/wisdom placed in me. Without any trial of my own, my heart and mind can distinguish spirits rapidly. My soul feels a sickness when the eyes of evil are near and there’s a tenderness present when God’s hand is upon a life. Its a ‘knowing’ that I can’t explain but can detect so clearly. I have used this to decipher those God is ‘calling me to’ and those ‘to stay clear of’. I cannot claim the spiritual gift of knowledge, but there have been instances that knowledge has been delivered to me… where I know of things to come in the lives of others or things past that I would otherwise have no way of knowing. I also cannot claim the word of wisdom, but I can say that many elders have spoken of a wisdom in my words that raises eyebrows.

The challenge to be given a gift like this from God is how to use it in reverence to those who may not understand or don’t care to understand. I can honestly say not many Christians even understand the complexity of spiritual gifts. While some gifts can be praised, others are chastised. I’m not sure if it’s an unbelief that the gift exists in such a person or if it’s just a lack of belief in the bible in general. I have been shunned, sneared at, put down and looked at as a liar for the knowledge I have been given. I wonder if our ‘selfish’ nature makes for an unbelieving society… that because we know our own selfishness and evil desires, we choose not to believe in a spiritual gift to protect ourselves from a possibility. So are we saving ourselves from a possibility of evil or the possibility of experiencing God?

Just three months ago, my church launched a 90-day tithing challenge. It was a call to trust in God that He would provide for us beyond our imagination. As I sat in the audience, I thought ‘well what more could He do for me that He’s not already doing… I tithe, I trust, that’s not a challenge’. But the spirit spoke to me ‘just because you already tithe and trust, doesn’t mean you can’t ask for more. Perhaps the problem is not so much that you don’t believe, but that you are trusting Him with all the small stuff.’.

I pulled out the bulletin insert and wrote ‘I’m taking the 90-day tithing challenge’. I wrote out a check for ‘ten percent’ and tossed it in the tithe bucket with my declaration. As it turns out, my sister couldn’t afford rent or her cell phone bill this month. So upon returning home, I wrote another check in the amount of her bills. As the next few Sundays flew by, people from the church climbed the stage to share their testimony of how God was providing in miraculous ways for their families since taking ‘the challenge. But 30 days in, I was beginning to feel the weight of my committment as my sister couldn’t afford another month’s worth of rent or the phone bill. I wrote out my challenge check and spotted her the cash with my parttime wages with trust that God was going to make everything alright.

60 days in, more extraordinary testimonies were being delivered at church, still not one had come to pass for me. I did begin to feel a heavy burden though, for the particular situation I was living in. It was a few months worth of harbored hurts that all began to stack up in my heart until I reached for a pen and wrote a letter to my landlord as notice of my departure. I had no place to go or any money to fall on, but I heard Him say this was the right thing to do.

As it turns out, my sister couldn’t afford rent or her phone bill for the third month in a row. So very shakily, I wrote the check for the challenge and cleaned out the rest of my savings to keep a roof over our heads. It was now mid-month, I still had no place to go. I remember sitting in front of the fireplace with my spiritual mentor talking about some of the deeper convictions I had been facing when she stopped me ‘you know Trisha, God is just placing it on my heart to tell you that my husband and I have a spare bedroom in our home if you’d want to stay with us. Pray about it and let me know what you decide’. Well it didn’t take too much prayer to know immediately this was what I had been waiting for! One last thing, what about my house full of ‘stuff’? Well, it turns out the church had a single car garage completely empty and offered it up as a place to store everything free of charge. In one week, everything I owned was packed up and stored away and I had a new address. As I went to the pastor to share my 90-day tithe testimony, he said ‘do you realize today wraps up the last day of the challenge’? My desperation knew I was close, but my faith didn’t care. I tested Him and He came through just like He says He will.

One last thing to note… one of my biggest struggles is patience 😉 God knew exactly what He was doing when He made me wait. It was all in His timing and in the end, with the enemy of time, logic and fear staring me in the face, I learned to trust Him, lean on Him and demonstrate a radical hope and faith in His promise.