Let Him Help You by Gina Butz

When I became a homeschool mom, I entered it with a naïve pride. After all, our son was only five. How hard could it be to teach a kindergartner? 

Turns out it can be incredibly difficult if said kindergartner is not interested in learning.

Three months into this educational experiment, I collapsed into a chair in the corner of my bedroom to discuss the situation with God. I prayed, “God, you are not going to believe this, but . . .” and told Him that I had no idea what I was doing. I was pretty sure I’d made some mistake that landed me in a place so far beyond what I thought I could manage.

Ever hear God chuckle? I’m pretty sure I did. Not in an unkind way, but in an, “Oh sweet child, I love you” kind of way. Appropriate, given the situation. And then He said, “Of course you don’t know what you’re doing. Let me help you.”

I admit that thought hadn’t occurred to me. Sometimes it just doesn’t. We are hardwired to go to our own resources first, and if those aren’t sufficient, only then do we look to God. But relying on human resources will only enable us to accomplish human tasks. God calls us to bigger situations than that, situations for which our resources are simply not enough.

So I began acknowledging my weakness to God. Rather than pushing through a hard homeschool day, I let myself take a break to ask God for the patience and wisdom I needed. I stopped expecting myself to know what I was doing and owned my insufficiency before Him, trusting Him to guide me. Rather than feeling like a failure, I felt relief—the burden to figure out this new season wasn’t on me. God was willing to carry me.

When the Israelites left Egypt and made their way to the promised land, they left behind all they knew and ventured into the unknown. Along the way they found themselves in need. In Exodus 16, they faced hunger and God provided for them through daily manna. They quickly realized it was no good trying to store up for the next day—it spoiled. So every day for 40 years, they relied on God to rain down bread from heaven to sustain them. This is a beautiful picture of the kind of dependence God calls us to. Each day, we look to Him for what we need, knowing that it will be there.

Depending on God is not simply a better option; it’s an issue of obedience. The Old Testament is a cautionary tale to us who continue to strive to do life on our own strength. Over and over we see biblical characters turn away from the living God to rely on themselves and useless idols. In Jeremiah 2:13, God’s attitude toward this is clear: “My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.”

God doesn’t just hope that we will rely on Him because He has more to offer. He commands us to rely on Him because He is God. He is worthy of being our first resource. He is the only one who deserves that place in our lives. Through trying times, He lets our neediness come to the surface, loosens our hold on our sinful ways of satisfying it, and returns us to the spring of living water. If we let go of our self-sufficiency, God can bring new life to us and to others, through us.

Let Him Help You is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Making Peace with Change: Navigating Life’s Messy Transitions with Honesty and Grace, by Gina Brenna Butz, releasing February 4th from Our Daily Bread Publishing. 

Gina Butz and her husband, Erik, have served with Cru for nearly 25 years, 13 of them in East Asia. They are currently raising their two third culture kids and an imported dog in Orlando, Florida, where Gina serves in global leadership development at Cru headquarters. Her first book, Making Peace with Change: Navigating Life’s Messy Transitions with Honesty and Grace, is available for pre-order. She blogs at GinaButz.com and loves to connect on Twitter and Facebook.