Faith in My Father

I’ve been doing a lot of driving lately.  Well, there’s nothing unusual about that.  But lately, the weather has been kind of “iffy”.  We’ve had a lot of fog, which sometimes can cause the roads to be icy.  We’ve had threats of storms--the storms haven’t hit where I am, but they’ve sometimes been predicted for places I needed to go.

For example, last week I needed to go to Armour to see my parents, because I hadn’t been there for a month or so.  We planned to leave on Thursday and come back on Friday.  Well, Thursday night and Friday morning there was a terrible fog.  There was a snowstorm predicted for Armour Friday night, and freezing rain was predicted for Gettysburg and points along the way.  So I had to make a decision on whether we were going to go and when we were going to go.  Were the roads going to be good enough for us to make the trip each way?  Who knew?

And all that got me thinking about when I was a kid.  Back then, I did not have to worry about things like that, because I did not have to make those decisions.  My dad did.  And as I look back on it, it’s kind of amazing how much trust I placed in Dad to make those decisions.  If Dad said the weather and the roads were good enough for us to go, then they were good enough for us to go.  If Dad said they weren’t, then they weren’t.  I had absolute confidence that whatever Dad decided must be right.

In fact, those decisions were probably not any easier for Dad back then than they are for me now. They may even have been harder--after all, there was no internet from which to get weather forecasts and road reports back then.  There was the TV and the radio, of course, but that was all.  Dad was probably no more confident about his decisions then than I am now.  And yet, I trusted him completely.  I had absolute faith in my father to take care of us.

I suspect our heavenly Father would like us to have that kind of faith in Him, too.  There are so many times when we wonder what we should do.  We worry about whether we’re making the right decisions.  And yet, many times, God has already told us what we should do.  God tells us that through the Bible.  God tells us that when we pray and ask.  And God would like us to react to what God tells us the same way that I reacted to my dad’s decisions about traveling. 

If God says to do something, then we should do it.  If God says not to do something, then we shouldn’t do it.  Now, of course, there are situations that come up in life in which it’s not that simple.  But there are situations in life in which it is.  Quite often, our problem is not that we don’t understand what God wants us to do.  Our problem is that we simply don’t want to do it.

God, of course, is completely confident that God’s decisions are right.  We can be completely confident about God’s decisions, too.  We can trust God completely.  Let’s listen to what God is telling us to do--and not to do.  Let’s have absolute faith that our heavenly Father will take care of us.