There are times in my life that
I've pursued God, and I've been praying for Him to do something,
and really angry that He didn't do it. Only to find out that
I kind of had it wrong, and what it was that I really needed in
my life. Many of you know that Amber, my wife, she has lupus. And so when Amber and I were
married, we knew that we wanted to have kids. And we believed
that God was going to give us kids. And we had virtually every
single doctor that she had tell us, don't try to have kids. But
we believed that God was going to provide us with kids, and
he was going to provide a way. And so we actually, this one
particular doctor, we said, look, hey, We really believe that we
want to do this. We're willing to take the risk.
And we want to know whether or not you'll be our doctor through
this. And after several visits of kind
of talking through it and him telling us the risks of that
and the other thing, he said, all right, I'll give you, I think it was like
three months of that for six weeks, don't take your medication,
because she had to get the medication out of her system. And then for
three months or whatever it was, we'll have this window for you
to get pregnant. But if you start to flare, if
your lupus starts to get out of control or anything like that,
or if in that three months you're unable to get pregnant, you've
got to promise you'll get back on your medication. So three months
or whatever it was went by. And you know what? We went to
the doctor. She didn't get pregnant. And
when we went to the doctor, and she wasn't pregnant, and he said,
look, we had this window. Her levels that they test to
see what her lupus is doing and stuff like that, they were elevated.
She was starting to go into a flare because she hadn't been on her
medication for four months, five months, or whatever it was. And
so he said, look, you've got to get back on your medication.
And we went back home from the doctor that day. We were devastated. We were totally devastated. We
were, I, there was, for, you know, I don't know, a number
of weeks, I remember us crying a lot, praying a lot, angry a
lot. I remember getting really irritated with God, cussing at
God, telling him what I thought, that I, you know, I believed,
and this and that, and the other thing, until we finally came
to a place of recognizing, you know what? I'm just kind of surrendering
that up to God. And it took a while, but we got
to this, a couple weeks, we got to this place of just saying,
all right, maybe God wants to, you know, make us spiritual parents
to other people, and that'll be, maybe it wasn't, maybe we
read it wrong, you know, when we were trusting God in this,
maybe it was a little bit different way, and stuff like that. Of
course, Amber, at that point, hadn't started taking her medication
yet, and took a pregnancy test three, you know, three weeks
after that, and found out she had been pregnant the whole time.
And it was just this incredibly joyful time
in our lives. And it wasn't until after we
sort of just hit rock bottom with surrendering up what we
wanted God to do and trying to, try to force his hand into what
we thought he should be doing. And you know what? Amber and
I, after she got pregnant, and obviously we have two healthy
kids today, we really felt like there were a couple things that
he taught us in that. And one of them was, you know
what? It doesn't matter what the outcome
is. If God isn't at the center of
it, then the outcome isn't going to be any good anyway. And we
really felt like that that's what he was teaching us. Was
that, you know what? You know who was at the center
of that before he allowed us to go through that? We were. And we really felt like, you
know, what he was teaching us, that we would never really get
the joy and have the faithfulness to our kids that we needed to
have until we realized they were his kids. And that any outcome
he was going to work out in our lives, it had to come with trusting
him first. One of the passages of scripture
that I feel like speaks to me so much is in the book of Exodus. Moses is bringing the people
of Israel through the desert and they are just complaining
and grumbling against God and so on and so forth. In this particular
time, Moses goes before God and he's talking to God and God finally
says this. He says, look, I'm gonna give you the promised land.
I'm going to give you the promised land and all that stuff, but
I'm not going. You guys go ahead. Everything I promised you I'd
do, I'm going to do. You go ahead, and you go in there.
But you guys, he says, you are stiff-necked people. You are
a complaining, ungrateful people. So you can have the promised
land, but I'm not going. And what I find to be so impactful
is Moses says, Lord, if you're not going, then there's no sense
in us going. And what I always think is so
impactful about that is that God actually offered Moses the
one thing that I feel like most Americans want. I want all the
outcome and benefit of what God can give me without having God
with me. I want all the stuff that comes
with it. I want all of the money, the blessing that could come
from God without actually having to serve Him. And Moses was able
to recognize in that moment, if you're not going, all of that
anything you could possibly give me is useless, unless you're
there. And that was something, maybe
one of the reasons why that speaks to me so much is because in that
moment, that was one of the things that we really felt like God
taught us. Maybe that's part of what God
is teaching all of us here tonight, is that the real outcome that
we need is not the thing necessarily we're praying for, but it's actually
seeing Jesus. That is the real miracle. And
that is real trust in God, that recognizing no matter what the
outcome is, if the outcome is that's where he is, then that's
where I'm gonna go. And I'm gonna follow him, I'm
gonna be persistent, I'm gonna persevere, doesn't matter if
it's hell or high water. I need God. No matter where I'm
going or what it is I think I need, if he's not there, it's useless.