Our Inexhaustible Father

"My help comes from the LORD...He who keeps you will not slumber...The LORD is your keeper...The LORD will protect you; He will keep your soul. The LORD will guard your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forever." Psalm 121:2-8

When my son Michael was three years old, he began waking up and crying out for me every night. He had just transitioned from a crib to a bed and suddenly had the freedom to leave his room. The first night he did this he made his way to the bottom of our stairs and cried out in such a way it scared me. I rushed downstairs to see him lying on the floor crying. I scooped him up and took him back into the dark room and sat down in the rocking chair comforting him. I loved those moments in the dark with him in the middle of night. Although, I knew things were fine and there was no reason for him to be scared I also understood that his fear was real to him. Night after night this occurred, eventually leaving me frustrated and exhausted. On his next doctor visit I shared his new habit with him and the doctor convinced me that the only way to break him from this habit was to let him lay there and scream. He said it would only take a short while for him to realize that I wasn’t coming but I was still there. The first night was sleepless once I heard him screaming but I stayed upstairs. The next morning, I came down at the crack of dawn to find him asleep on the bottom step. When he awoke, he was the same sweet tenderhearted love that he always was...he had survived his fear and so had I! Sure enough after 3 nights of not going downstairs the habit broke and he stayed in his bed during the night from then on. He just needed his mind to quieten his fear and remind him that I was just upstairs, and things were fine.

I don’t think that we are that much different from my little boy on those dark and fearful nights. We are all those little children who just want comfort from their Father. We face scary circumstances and cry out to God. No matter how many times He scoops us up meeting and comforting us where we are, we continue to resurrect the fear. We need the continual comfort of our Father when the night is dark and long. But sometimes just like the doctor said, we need to work through our fear with our faith as our backdrop. We need to call upon the Holy Spirit to remind us that our Father has everything under control. We need to be confident that God is just 'upstairs' even though we cannot see or feel Him. God fully understands that our fears are real to us although He sees all our outcomes. He knows how the story plays out…how the provision will come…when the season will end. But sometimes He does allow us to ‘lay at the base of the stairs and cry for a while to work through our fear.’ But make no mistake, just as I never was far from Michael, God is always close by. But thankfully, our cries cannot frustrate or exhaust God. He is the inexhaustible ever-faithful unconditional lover of our soul. And eventually our fear will be overcome, and God will bring resolution to everything that concerns us.