Can My Maker Handle Me
"I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter." — Winston Churchill, nearing the end of his life.
Do you ever feel like you are just too much for God? If He only knew you. If He could only see the mess that you are, the things you've done, surely He'd never want to deal with that, to accept that, to accept YOU.
Even the great, lion-hearted Winston Churchill questionned His Maker's willingness to take on the "ordeal" of dealing with his life.
Well, gues what?! He IS ready for you. There is no mess too big that you cannot bring him. No sin that He will not swallow up in forgiveness, in mercy, and grace.
"All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away" (John 6:37, NIV).
Prayer Changes Me
In the 2003 movie Bruce Almighty, Jim Carrey portrays a television reporter named Bruce Nolan. Bruce is a man who constantly complains about God. At one point he complains that, “God is a mean kid sitting on an anthill with a magnifying glass, and I'm the ant. He could fix my life in five minutes if He wanted to, but He'd rather burn off my feelers and watch me squirm.”
God (played by Morgan Freeman) confronts Bruce and says, “You've been doing a lot of complaining about me, Bruce. Quite frankly, I'm tired of it.” To prove to Bruce that He knows what He’s doing, God offers to let Bruce try to run the world in His place. Feeling confident he is up to the task, Bruce excitedly accepts. He soon realizes, however, the enormity and complexity of God’s work, particularly in answering prayers. In one scene, Bruce is so overwhelmed at the amount of prayers he has to answer, that he has them all put into a database and answers “Yes” to every one. As a result, over 400,000 people get the winning lottery numbers, but they only win $17.00 each.
Intellectually we all understand that God cannot say yes to every request we bring before Him, but I imagine many of us have wondered why he doesn’t say yes more often. We have difficulty understanding why some people seem to have their prayers answered, but when we pray for the same thing, heaven seems silent. We wonder, “Does prayer really change things?” Yes, it most certainly does! But it might not always bring the change we are expecting.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done." Jesus' initial request was not granted but the ultimate desire of His heart was. God's will was done. And His own heart was prepared for what would follow because He submitting Himself to God's will ahead of time. He went from "deeply sorrowful" to accepting of His circumstances. God cannot say yes to every request, but desiring His will before our own changes the most important thing ... us!
Teen Orphan Finds A Home
In 2013, the world, in tears, watched the viral video of Davion Only, an orphaned teenager, who stood at the front of a church and pleaded for someone—anyone—to adopt him. Dressed in his best suit, he stood at the podium saying that he wasn’t picky. They could be “black or white, old or young, mom or dad.” He just wanted someone to love him “until I die.”
He said he was growing impatient, but he wouldn’t lose hope. “I know God hasn’t given up on me, so I’m not giving up either.”
In response to his plea, his foster agency received thousands of inquiries from people interested in giving Davion a home. He even went to live with a prospective adoptive family, only to be returned to foster care over conflict with his adoptive siblings. Over the next year, he lived in a succession of four more temporary placements.
Throughout his journey to find a “forever” home, Davion leaned heavily on his caseworker, Connie Going, repeatedly asking her if she would be his mother. Connie, who had two biological daughters, as well as a son whom she had already adopted out of foster care, was continually resistant to his pleas, holding out hope that there was a great home waiting somewhere out there for him.
But all that changed with Davion's latest plea. “In adoption there is a ‘claiming moment,’ when you know someone is your child. When he called me to ask, in that moment, I just knew. … When he asked me, my heart felt this ache and I just knew he was my son.”
Ms. Going followed the prompting of her heart and entered her application for his adoption. It will become final April 22, 2015.
As his caseworker for more than 10 years (and already the mom of another adopted foster child), Going is all too familiar with the challenges which lie ahead. She knows that Davion has a temper, that he struggles with interpersonal relationship with his peers, that he struggles with depression and self-esteem issues. But she is undaunted.
“I want him to know he is unconditionally loved for who he is, the way he is,” she says. “The changes he chooses to make in his life, and the choices, are his to make. As a family we will be there through it all, the good and the bad for our lifetime. He is home.”
Click here for a 2013 interview of Davion and his caseworker Connie Going.
Have you searched for unconditional love and acceptance from the world, only to be turned away time and time again? Are you still searching for the moment when you will be "claimed" by someone who promises to love you no matter what?
In our hearts, all of us (even those from loving, nurturing families) long for a “forever” home—a place where we can be unconditionally loved and accepted without any fear of rejection or abandonment, not just until we die, as Davion hoped, but truly for “forever.” That kind of security can come from God alone.
His offer of adoption is for every single soul who longs for that kind of acceptance.
As Going suggested, “In every adoption there is a ‘claiming’ moment.” In the case of the seeker, that's the moment when we turn our search for perfect love and acceptance to the only one who could fulfill it; to the one who was almost too obvious; to the one who has been there all along. It is in that moment, when we call upon God to become our adoptive parent, that the heart that has ached for us, claims us as His own.
The moment we do that, we are home!
“God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure” (Ephesians 1:5, NLT). “God sent Jesus to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children. And because we are his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, prompting us to call out, ‘Abba, Father’” (Galatians 4:5-6, NLT).