God Did It

“[I am] confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion.”

Philippians 1:6

I have always known I wanted to be a writer.

From the moment I discovered books, I knew I wanted–needed–to write them. And for all the years since, I’ve never stopped writing. In fact, there hasn’t been a season of my life in which I wasn’t writing something.

And yet, I’ve rounded the corner on forty, and still those words have yet to find their way into the wider printed, published world.

Sometimes I look around and start to feel a rising desperation, a restlessness. An impatience. When? When will it finally happen?

Have you ever dreamed a dream for so long, you began to doubt it could ever happen? I mean those dreams God Himself seems to lay on your heart, like promises He intends to keep?

On one of those days recently, I turned to Scripture to calm my impatient, honestly hurting, heart. I found words like those of Habakkuk 2:6, “ For it is not yet time for it to come true. The time is coming in a hurry, and it will come true. If you think it is slow in coming, wait for it. For it will happen for sure, and it will not wait.” The passage refers to a vision God has just given Habakkuk, but the words spoke to me, too. A gentle reminder that the visions God lays on our hearts are for an appointed time–but they always come true. How I needed those words.

Several months ago, my husband and I purchased a beautiful brick historic farmhouse. It was the culmination of ten years’ worth of prayers. Ten years.

We’d been asking God for a place of healing, a place we could open to other couples, to those who were hurting, even to our family. We prayed every day for ten years that God would do this thing He’d laid on our hearts, this thing we couldn’t even always define with words.

Those ten years were long, and we often wondered whether we’d imagined the dream we held in our hands. Whether God ever intended to fulfill it at all.

The years were long, but they weren’t wasted.

Looking back, it’s easy to see how God used those years to slowly refine our vision, our understanding of the thing we wanted so much. How, again and again, He broke our hearts and remade them into something new. How He took what started as a small idea with a small footprint, and multiplied it into something far greater than we could have imagined.

When God finally moved, quickly and unexpectedly (as He often does), the fruition of those prayers didn’t look much like what we’d started asking for ten years ago. Or even six months ago. In fact, it was so different, I nearly missed it! It was my husband who recognized what God was doing, that THIS was that moment and that place we’d been asking for for so long.

Our family has settled in and we’re rejoicing in this home in every way. But God wasn’t finished setting dreams in our hearts. From the moment we stepped through these doors, He’s been whispering about all the things He could do here, filling our imaginations with hopes and dreams and new prayers.

It’s just a house. I’ll acknowledge that. But, aside from all God has done and will do through it, it’s become a sort of ebenezer for me, a “stone of help,” a physical reminder of what God can, and has, done. It’s become a wilderness altar, a literal bricks-and-mortar monument, a testament to God’s faithfulness even through the years of waiting.

Already, in the months since our move, we’ve pointed back to the journey to this house many times. We’ve looked at one another in the midst of discouragement and whispered, “Yes, but look what God did.”

Because God did it. The journey to this place was so unlikely, so impossible, that only He could have done it. I cling to that these days. When I’m discouraged about my writing, yes. But also when I face the challenges of raising teens. When I meet overwhelming needs in my workplace. When I look at the world around me and all the pain hidden in every corner.

“The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise as some understand slowness, but He is patient with you…” (2 Peter 3:9)

Oh, friend, what things has God laid on your heart? What desires have you been pouring out at His feet, year after year? What places in your life have felt stuck, immovable, as though God has forgotten they were even there?

Take hope. Take courage. Renew your faith in His sovereignty–but also in His faithfulness. He who began that work in You, who planted the seeds of desire that match His heart–He will see it to completion. Perhaps not in the time you thought. Perhaps not even in the way you imagined. But when He moves, when He does it, it will exceed anything you could have accomplished on your own.

I know, because I’ve seen it. God did it, and He will do it again.