A Dance of Faith and Obedience

Navigating Uncertainty and Trusting God’s Guidance

I opened The Captive's Psalm today, probably for the first time since I started llamherst.com. I am in the middle of a whirlwind transition, in a way that reminded me again that faith and obedience are rarely a straight path. Sometimes obedience is simply taking the next step without understanding where it leads, and faith is trusting the One leading when I can no longer see where I am going. He walked me through accomplishing things I never thought or imagined I would do in this season, only to bring me to a point inside it where I felt I had failed Him, even as I looked at this beautiful thing He and I have built together. Then, out of nowhere, as I felt the full weight of helplessness and failure, He blew open doors of opportunity that I haven’t even had a moment to process or understand.

Holding Our Breath in Deep Waters

Part of that comes from the jarring and time-consuming transition. I depleted every possible resource I had in obedience, to the point that there are still consequences affecting me in potentially overwhelming ways. The opportunities arrived, but they did not instantly remove the consequences of my obedience, so I had to begin moving immediately. What remains is overwhelming and terrifying, far outside of my ability to navigate. I feel as if I am literally an infant in deep waters, unable to swim or save myself, with only the ability to hold my breath. It is that deep. I see His hand, and I know He is coming for me. Despite the fact that I am holding my breath and I am in deep water, I know I’m not going to drown.

Hearing God's Voice in Unexpected Moments

I have repeatedly circled back to this confidence I have that He is always talking to us. And that is the primary reason for everything I have just laid out. More often than not, He speaks in ways we don’t expect or immediately understand. Listening to Him requires every sense we have, an openness to the ways He moves and a willingness to respond when we feel the smallest pull toward something we cannot yet explain. Like the sudden urge to reach into the back of the car and pick up the book we wrote together, sitting in the backseat. The moment I take to simply hold it and look at what He had done. Feeling every ounce of unbelief at the fact that He brought something so beautiful out of something that was so dark.

“My Timing Is Perfect”: Discernment and Divine Timing

Then the sudden thought to open it, and as I do, words jump off the page, not because they are more impressive than the words surrounding them, but simply because my eyes obediently fall on them. The weight of everything they speak in that moment is pure oxygen in lungs that have been holding their breath.

And I can’t explain how He does it.

“My timing is perfect,” these words say.

With those spoken words comes a flash of understanding. The depth of their meaning, especially in this moment of my life. (Absorbing, hearing, touching, tasting, feeling all these things takes an openness to a sixth sense that does not come naturally to us.) I don’t have redeeming skills to unwrap or unpack the storm that surrounds me, or to make sense of any of it. Yet in those words, as He speaks, heaven touches earth all around me.

It is something that can only be described as a moment where I stand in the clarity of the cosmos.

Those moments carry something David often communicated: a humility and awe that comes with the realization of our tiny existence inside that cosmos, and a great love that washes over the soul as that awareness comes wrapped in the knowledge of His mindfulness of us, even as He holds the vastness of space in place.

The Dance of Faith and Obedience

I am still in deep waters.

But I know He is with me.

I trust His words.

My role is simply a dance of faith and obedience.