Learning What is Needful for Now, and Letting All Else Go

I have always wanted to save the world.

When I was a child, I admonished my friends who didn't finish their lunches... there were starving children in Africa!

At age eleven I wrote a petition to save the whales and walked around my neighborhood asking for signatures.

In ninth grade I gave an impassioned speech to my English class on the horrors of abortion.

When I was in college I became a student counselor.  And then spiraled into a deep darkness as I realized that the problems of the world were far greater than one little girl could even comprehend, much less solve.

It wasn't until I began to study Jesus in the bible, in my mid-twenties, that I began to understand.   Jesus had already saved the world, but it looked very different from what anyone expected.  The solution was not temporal... it was eternal.

I still hung on to my desire to rescue, to help.  And as I gave my life more and more to Jesus, my heart swelled with love, and my grief over others' suffering just magnified.
 
The need is so great.  Overwhelmingly great.  I have worn myself bone-tired trying to meet the need.  The need in my home, the need in my little community, the need pressing pressing pressing from everywhere.  All over our ever-shrinking internet-connected world.

In this season of my life, as I seek to draw into the presence of God and remain, to dwell there as I go about my busy day, I have seen something new as I sit at His feet in the Word.

Jesus did not meet every physical need in his earthly ministry.

There were lepers He did not heal.  There were sick people who died.

Jesus even spoke about this:

"I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian." Luke 4: 25-27

Jesus did only what His father told Him.  Elijah and Elisha healed only those to whom they were called. 

Shouldn't I follow such an example?

This is the rest into which I am called, into which you are called.  Resting in His presence, learning the now thing, the needful thing.  

Working at it with all my heart, my hands His to use.  

Letting all else go.

photo by DuBoix

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