He Doeth All Things Well

This week I had the honor of being in one of the sweetest deliveries of my career.

The parents were kindhearted, sweet people, the family who loved them were abundant, but not in any way obtrusive and the delivery itself was easy and gentle.

A few hours after delivery, I went in the room to check on the mother.  The father was asleep in the chair beside her bed and she was cradling her daughter in her arms. I asked her if there was anything she needed and she looked up at me with a face of perfect peace and contentment.  Her daughter's face reflected the same and the whole vignette could have been a Renaissance painting.

That young mother can never know how much her peaceful embrace of her child spoke to me of the Lord.  The Lord desires for us to know we are cradled in His arms as well and there is no safer place for us to be. 

When our son was deployed to Iraq, friends and colleagues asked me often, "Aren't you terrified?"

The truth was I wasn't.  

I truly believed it was the Lord's will for our son to become a Marine, and to become a Force Recon Marine.  It was the will of the his Commander-in-Chief, through the United States Marine Corps,  to send him to Iraq.  The Scriptures command that we all "obey them that have the rule over you, and submit yourselves,"  (Hebrews 13:17.)

So in going to Iraq, my son was being obedient to the Marine Corps Commander, his Commander-in-Chief and most especially, to the Lord.  The way I usually answered the question was this, "If it is the Lord's will for my son to go to Iraq, then he is safer there than if he were in my living room."

It was confidence in the Lord that gave me the sense of peace while Noah was deployed.  Not only that my son was safe in His care, but that He would see me through if anything happened to my son.  I often repeated the verse, "...safety is of the Lord," (Proverbs 21:31.)

The young mother cradling her baby girl will face countless temptations to fear during her daughter's lifetime. Just because sweet little Caroline becomes an adult does not mean her mother's temptations will cease.  No,  a mother is a mother for the rest of her life.  It is in those moments of temptation Caroline's mother must affirm what she knows from Scriptures to be true and to rest on those promises given to us that the Lord will never leave us nor forsake us.  In every trial and tribulation, He is there, in fact, we can not face a temptation that He has not already overcome.

We can look forward to the future knowing that "whatever befalls us," as the old hymn says, "Jesus doeth all things well."