Guest post: Trust Abba

a personal faith story written by my dear friend Angela

Has God ever gifted you a season of learning to live in full trust of your Father? Has He ever sent you on a journey that felt like it went so against your nature it took everything in you to allow Him to show you that He can be trusted? Has He ever convicted your heart to live radically different than how our culture teaches?  If your answers are no, I pray that you will one day get the incredible gift of seeing with your own eyes how far your Father can be trusted. Because its infinitely far…Today my Father has directed me to share with you the story of this unfolding revelation in my own life. I have learned that the ends of this earth do not even remotely come close to the lengths at which I can trust my Father.

To fully understand this story, I guess you will first have to know a little about me. My name is Angela and I am a wife and mother of 4. I also work full-time as a personal caregiver to a soul that’s sweeter than honey. My husband and I met in youth group as teenagers but didn’t date until I was 20. His sweet mama connected us by telling me to invite him to my church small group and telling him to date me. I hope that I told her thank you while she was still alive because he is my best friend. My children are the biggest blessing that I could have ever been entrusted with.  We have 3 daughters and a son ages 8, 6, 5, & 2. On our first date, my husband and I were already talking about our future. We knew we were supposed to marry each other that night. We both wanted 4 children and didn’t have to compromise on that at all. We both loved the Lord and desired to raise our children in a home that honored Him. That night we were unknowingly weaving together a plan to control the outcome of our lives. We married, had our 4 children and wiped the dirt off our hands as if our plans were final. After all, 4 was our number.  My husband scheduled THE appointment that everyone schedules when they are done having children and we were ready to close that chapter of our lives. Or so we thought. (Spoiler alert, I asked him to cancel it…) This is really where our story begins.

After he made that appointment, I began to feel so uneasy about the finality in making a permanent decision like that at our age. He was only 30 at the time and I did not want to one day regret making a permanent decision. So, we agreed that instead, I would go on a long lasting birth control. At this time nether one of us were truly in tune with our Father and we were making ALL of these decisions without ever stopping to pray about it. We didn’t think twice. After all everyone uses birth control and plans their family size these days. “God will bless it” I thought to myself. 

From December 2020-November 2022 I grew increasingly closer to God. I was learning more and more about the character and nature of God. The closer I got with God the more realigned my heart became. The more realigned with God my heart became, the more I began to embrace a personal conviction I felt for controlling something so precious and so intimate. For months, God pressed my heart and asked that I surrender my plans to Him.  So, I compromised with God and opted for a daily birth control instead of the more permanent type I was using.  I felt like if I was using a daily birth control then I could more easily surrender that control to Him if and when I felt like I was supposed to.  If you could see my face right now you would probably know how well that worked out for me. Again, over a period of a few months God continued to speak to my heart about my personal rebellion to Him in this area and I knew it was time to have a conversation with my husband. Over coffee one day I poured my heart out to him. “I’m so sorry, I know you always only wanted 4 kids and I know we’re done but I’m struggling because God has convicted my heart about my rebellious ways. He has called me to surrender our plans for the future to Him and I need to you spend some time praying about this.” I spoke out as tears trailed my cheeks. I was ruining his expectations. He was never going to agree with me on this and I felt ridiculous for even approaching him about this. A few months more went by and we began to have conversations about a possible 5th baby. Conversations turned into 6-month plans and again God pressed. I heard my Father’s plea, “Angela, I have not called you to make plans…I have called you to allow Me to use you for MY plans.” I realized almost as quickly as we were making plans that these plans were never going to appease God’s desire to be trusted fully with our lives.  Again, in tears I wept to my husband… “These plans won’t work, they are not God’s instruction for us. Pray about it again.”  A few weeks later he came back to me and said “I have peace about it. We’re supposed to trust Him.”  

We stepped into obedience and began walking this trust journey with our Father. Little did I know how much I am still learning about what it really looks like to give God full creative rights. You see, I thought that we had arrived at full trust with God when we surrendered our fertility to Him. I thought this was the destination that God had called us to. In reality, it was only a stepping stone. Trusting God with our fertility was the gateway that God knew we needed because life in this temporal state would quickly require us to be prepared to trust Him fully.

On May 18th I received a phone call at work from my husband and the second I answered it my heart sank. I knew before he could even get the words out, that he had been in a car accident. He was hurt but didn’t know how badly and his vehicle was without a doubt totaled. He was less than a mile from his first destination after work to pick up our 6-year-old daughter. He was loaded into an ambulance and I arrived at the accident scene just in time to watch an ambulance whisk him away with lights and sirens on. I began making phone calls. I arranged to have my mother pick up the 3 kids she was closest to and I went to get my 6-year-old and deliver her to a friend. I called a trusted friend and through frantic tears explained what was happening. She calmed me down and prayed with me. I don’t remember what she prayed but I remember that her prayer set the tone for the rest of my evening. I felt an odd sense of peace in the midst of turmoil. After we got off the phone God reminded me of the journey that I’ve been on towards walking in full-trust with Him.  “Palms open Angela. You cannot cling onto your life any longer. It must be fully Mine.” 

That night we discovered that the accident had been so bad that if my 6-year-old had actually been with him in the truck, she would have likely been killed on impact. Her door crumpled into her car seat. The cab of his truck shifted nearly 2 feet.  Small Mercy. When I arrived to the hospital, he was in a trauma room and I could not see him. I paced the room and made more phone calls. Prayers were being prayed from across the world and he was being examined from head to toe. Other than a severe burn from the airbag, vertigo and abdominal pain, He was given the all clear and I drove us home together around midnight that night.

The next morning the gravity of the situation really began to set in…We were out a vehicle and we normally work overlapping shifts. He works 7am-5pm and I work 2pm-9pm. He gets the kids from daycare after work and I don’t get home until nearly 10 some nights.  One car with our schedule just doesn’t work. However, summer was quickly approaching and my hours change since school is out. So really, we were blessed that this happened at a time when we have 2 full months to figure out what to do. After the insurance pay out and the truck got paid off, we walked away with nothing.  As the days went on God continued to press, “Palm’s open Ang.” We made the decision to give this problem of ours to our Father and trust Him with it entirely.  That has been extremely difficult to put into practice. But at the same time there has not been a single moment without complete peace in our circumstances. Peace that for some has been difficult to understand. Peace that has been a gift from our Father. 

As the weeks went on, we saw God working. In the first week we received $480 in gifts from friends and strangers. The week after, we were approached by an individual who wanted to lend my husband a vehicle free of charge. This individual is adamant that God get all the glory and has remained anonymous. We praise God. We had 3 car seats replaced by anonymous members of our church.  All of these things are incredible but there had still been so much need left unanswered.  Last week my husband and I each had to remind ourselves that God is working it all out.  Doubt is inevitable. Small moments of doubt will always creep in. In many points in my own life that doubt would have been all consuming. Resisting the temptation to pick the control back up from my Father has at times required the spiritual support of dear friends. But remaining steadfast in prayer and trusting God with the hard parts has proven worth it. Last week my husband was approached by his boss with a new job opportunity in his company. Yesterday it was finalized. This change brings a modest raise, more responsibility, more room for growth in the company, and wait for it…a work van.  The fireworks in my soul nearly blew the roof off!

God did it! He faithfully has been working all these details out and hasn’t let us struggle for anything. “Angela, I told you I am trustworthy. But now you see with your flesh what I can do with your life when you let me handle the details, I Am the I Am. I have called you to obedience. Have I not proven myself worthy of your obedience? When you are obedient I have so much more space to bless you because you are not so caught up in stress trying to ‘fix’ it all for yourself when you’re really just making a bigger mess of things. Walk in My Spirit and let Me guide you through the refining fire of your afflictions. I am sanctifying you, cleansing you, pruning the distractions from your life because I am the I Am and I Am, worthy of your full attention. Walk with me and I will be your guide. Keep your eyes on Me and you will not be lead astray but take your eyes off of Me and like Peter, you will sink into the pressure of sin. Grace is yours only through Me. My grace for you is boundless. My affection for you is limitless. Trust Abba.”