Post #1: In Calm and In Crisis
This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity.
I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”
Jeremiah 29 : 10 - 14 (NIV)
Scripture reading: Jeremiah chapter 29Post by: Matt GI am a planner and I am a control freak. I have worked in finance for over 10 years and know how to forecast, budget, and plan ahead. My wife and I had discussed when the “right” time to have a baby would be. We would assess our career situations, forecast our finances, coordinate our grand travel plans, and then set a date to start trying. Once the date was set, we’d find an excuse to move the date. Finally this past fall we decided that our savings was sufficient and our careers were heading in the right direction. Though I was in the midst of moving to a new job, the economic outlook was more than secure. It was time to have a baby.
Flash forward six months: My wife is five months pregnant, the COVID-19 pandemic is infecting hundreds of thousands of people, the Dow is down over 25% year-to-date, my industry is essentially on-hold, and the hospital where my wife works has a growing number of COVID-19 patients. This is a doomsday scenario that I could not have imagined when planning on having a child. The most interesting part of all this: I am not afraid.
Isaiah 29:11 says “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” I think that this verse is often taken out of context and used to promote prosperity without pain. The context of the verse is that God spoke these words to the people of Judah WHILE they were captives of the Babylonians. This was a catastrophic situation for the people of Judah. They were uprooted from the land that God had promised their forefathers and forced them to be subject to pagans. In the midst of it, God’s message was essentially, “Get used to this because this is going to be a while. Trust me because I am in control. I have plans for you that you couldn’t dream of.” Sometimes God has plans for prosperity and sometimes he has plans for pain. He uses both to refine us, draw us closer to Him, and to write His plan, not just for ourselves, but for the universe.
Since I found out my wife was pregnant and made the career switch, I have been asking God to take control of my life from me. I have found that by asking Him for wisdom, asking Him to help me trust Him more, and diving into His Word more often, He has revealed Himself to me in such a way that I can no longer try to control my life. He has shown me that He alone can take care of my family, even in spite of my futile efforts to mitigate risk.
In Calm and In Crisis is a blog to help convey God’s simple truths as found in scripture and show how we can apply them to our lives everyday. The contributors are all people who wake up every morning and need our Savior’s grace just as much as everyone else. It is our goal to share what His word has revealed to us so that you might live a life knowing that our Heavenly Father is always at work, in times of calm and in times of crisis.
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