My God shall supply all your needs, according to His riches in glory.

My God is the God who shows up. He’s never once let me down or not come through when I needed Him. When we call, He answers. He did this thousands of years ago, over and over for His people. He showed up for Abraham – told Abraham He would make him the father of many nations, gave him a son even when he was so old it should have been impossible, and then God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son. This was a test of his loyalty, but Abraham didn’t know that. He got up early in the morning, gathered the sticks for the fire, called for his only son, and together they started trudging up Mount Moriah. On the way, his son Isaac asked, “dad, where’s our ram for the sacrifice?” Abraham knew that his son was the sacrifice, but he answered, “God will provide”.

Side note here: I can’t imagine. I can’t imagine waiting your whole life for a promise God gave you – (because God promised this boy to Abraham and Sarah years before he was even born) and then being asked to give it back. I can’t imagine the feeling of the knife in your hand as you march your only son, your most precious treasure, toward certain death. I can’t imagine what level of trust Abraham had in God that this would still somehow work out for His glory and for Abraham’s good.

But, Abraham’s journey with God didn’t start right here.

They had history together.

Many years before, God asked Abraham to get up and leave his home. Out of nowhere, God uprooted Abraham, made him a wanderer who traveled through other people’s lands. God promised him a new home, but Abraham had to obey first and get up and leave his comfortable home without knowing where he was going, before God provided.

Same story years later. God asked Abraham to get up and obey (sacrifice your son) without knowing what would happen next. But he knew, based on the track record God had in his life, that God would provide.

My life, like your life and everyone else’s, is a series of seasons strung together. Physical seasons, yeah, sure – where summer changes into fall and so on, but I’m talking about spiritual and emotional seasons here.

Sometimes things are easy. There’s enough money to stretch to pay all of the bills and save up for vacation or pay extra on the car payment. God feels close because He answers the way you want Him to, and things feel comfortable and you don’t need extra help. In my life, I don’t get much time in these seasons. I think that’s on purpose. He knows that, like sheep, I have a tendency to wander. My stubborn heart will go chasing after anything that’s distracting from what I should be doing. In the seasons of plenty, I have a tendency to forget that I need Him. I do things myself, I forget to call on Him or spend time with Him or ask Him how I can be used to help others. And He knows that. He knows I need Him, but I don’t remember it unless I’m in the dark. So sometimes, He lets me stay in the dark because that’s where I learn to depend on Him for what I need.

Sometimes things are kind of in the middle, where I feel like I’m waiting for something to happen. Things are ok and have been for a while, but it just feels like change is on the way. It feels like not quite the end of one series of days or events, but not the beginning of another season either. These are the days when I wake up and go through the routines and then go to bed and then wake up the next day and do it all again on autopilot. These days have their own challenges, but that’s a story for another day.

Then, there are times when the road is dark. I can’t see two steps in front of my own face. I’m uncertain and I doubt what I know I’ve heard God speak, even though when He spoke it was so very clear. These times bring me to the end of myself. These are the days when I pour out everything I’ve got, and I get to the end of the day and Satan starts in on me, whispering in my ear, “it wasn’t enough. You aren’t good enough”.

I’m waiting on God to provide but I have no idea how He’s going to pull it off. I need a miracle and it’s the eleventh hour and there’s no time left and things feel desperate and a little hopeless.

That’s when He reminds me that we have history too.

He reminds me of the time we needed a water pump installed in the basement. We didn’t have water to the kitchen for a few days because of a pipe issue, we had our foster son at the time, and things were so very hard. We were in the middle of a spiritual warfare battle for our lives, and everything was quite literally upside down for us. The plumber told us it would be $9,000 to put in this pump. I didn’t have the money for that, but He whispered, “I will provide for you”.

I told the plumber to go ahead and do the work, put in the pump. We emptied out our savings and paid cash for 30% of the work up front. I told God that was all I’d had. He said “good. now it’s My turn”.

So the plumber finished the job, and I called to see how much we still owed. I was hoping for some sort of secret miracle where the job would have cost less than they thought, and that maybe we would be able to scrape together enough on our own to pay what was left. To my dismay, we still owed almost $7,000. I knew we didn’t have that much in any of our bank accounts combined. I think there was $300 in the bank. I told the plumber to come back on Monday and that we would have the money. This was on a Friday afternoon. I prayed all weekend. I told my bible study group and they prayed. I met a random kid in the grocery store that asked me if he could pray for me for anything specific. I told him about the pump and he prayed with me, then gave me $20. The Lord used that precious college kid to remind me that He would provide.

I would like to say that I was full of faith and that I trusted up until the very last second, but the truth is – I was scared to death. I worried about it every single day. I had to keep reminding my heart that He is faithful, that He always has been, and that He always will be. Because that’s the secret to having great faith – giving Him your fear every single time it pops up, and then stepping forward in obedience anyway.

Monday morning rolled around, and I went to the bank to start collecting the little money that we had, still praying that God would show up. It was the last hour, there was no back up plan. I didn’t have a secret loan to borrow money from, or a rich uncle that had died. I had a few savings bonds, worth about $1,000 altogether, and the $300 that was in our bank account already. I still can’t tell you how the money got there, except God.

I got to the bank teller and asked her to tell me the balance of our savings. I had her leave the minimum amount in there that was required to keep the account open, and pull the rest out in cash. Then we moved to the checking account, to our backup savings account, and even to an old christmas money savings account for the kids. Each time she pulled up a new account, there was money in there that wasn’t in there the day before. A paycheck came in early, there was a refund that had been processed on our card for amazon purchases we’d returned, but nothing to explain the fact that there was money in every single account. When we got to the last account, there was enough to pay off the plumber’s bill, PLUS enough left over for us to live off of until our next payday that Friday.

Like oil in a jar that doesn’t run out. (1 Kings 17:14, 2 Kings 4:1-7)

This wasn’t the first time God showed up for us, and it won’t be the last.

He’s moving here again, asking big things from us, and promising BIG things in return. If He’s doing the same for you, know that you can trust Him. He is faithful.

“I’m confident that I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.” Psalm 27:13