faith Archives - Gindi Vincent

I’d been pondering the silly things which had been keeping me up lately. Stewing in fear instead of moving forward in faith.

So the news story caught my attention immediately. I set the iPad down, turned off the trainwreck in my head, and leaned forward.

Last year, a middle school boy in our town was pitching for his team when a baseball hit him in the chest, stopping his heart. The ambulance came and rushed him to the hospital where he endured a lengthy recovered. He has no physical activities this past year. The camera shot to him standing on the pitcher’s mound. He was returning to baseball to play this eighth grade year.

The reporters interviewed him and his mom. He was excited, but nervous, to be back. Then he lifted his jersey to reveal what looked like a bullet proof vest. Apparently, an inventor made this powerful shield to protect pitchers on the baseball field. When the interview cut back to his sweet momma, she said he wouldn’t be playing without it.

He went back to the sport that nearly killed him, but he went back with protection.

They flashed to him rounding second base with a face splitting grin.

Whoa.

It felt like a story God custom delivered to my television set this weekend.

We can let fear stop us from going back to what we’re called to do. Fear’s great about that. It gives us an excuse. Sometimes it’s all in our imagination, but sometimes that fear is very well grounded in reality. I can only imagine if you nearly died on the pitcher’s mound, it would be intensely scary to go back.

Or, we can press past the fear, and lean into our calling, but go in suited up with protection. In Ephesians 6, God gives us that exact visual when He outlines the scary battles we will most certainly face as we step out in faith. Yet He offers a breastplate. A shield. A sword.

But even with that armor on, the instruction is not to then go charging off into the battle. The direction is: “Stand. Stand firm.”

There’s a verse I’ve clung to since 2014. The translation I memorized always said, “The Lord will fight for you, you need only be still.”

It comes from a scene in Exodus 14 where the Israelites have just escaped their Egyptian tormentors. Yet they immediately find themselves trapped in the desert with an uncrossable sea in front of them and a furious army of Egyptians rapidly closing in behind them.

That fear was real. Death, by all realistic assessments, was imminent.

I went back to that verse today. I read it in six different translations. But I saw something different in it this time. “You need only be still” is regularly translated instead to equivalent of “if you’ll be quiet.”

The New American translation says, “The Lord will fight for you while you keep silent…” In the King James, it says, “The Lord will fight for you, and you shall hold your peace.” The English Standard Version says, “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.” And in the pull-no-punches Message translation, it says, “God will fight the battle for you. And you? You keep your mouths shut!”

The people were all yelling at Moses, why did you bring us out here to the desert to die. Why didn’t you just leave us to servitude in Egypt?

Well, that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but they were yelling out from a place of fear. And we often don’t make a lot of sense when we’re talking out of a place of fear instead of faith.

So the response was basically to hold on and shut up.

I needed to be reminded to stand firm but shut up. Fear talks loudly. It drowns out God’s voice. So if we spend our time arming ourselves with the breastplate of righteousness and shield of faith, we can be ready for the God to step into the middle of our fearful situation and do something crazy. Something like a pillar of cloud and parting of a sea.

Once you’re armed with a shield of faith, you won’t doubt that a pillar of cloud and parting of a sea can happen. Because God is still doing crazy unfathomable things today.

If He can restart a boy’s heart and set him back out on a pitcher’s mound (with a shield of protection), He can do the same for you and me.

We squinted at the small screen as the radar showed a long line of storms from San Angelo to Oklahoma City. Unfortunately, we were headed north on I-35 to visit my father in Oklahoma City.

We would have been on edge in any event given the deep red shades on the radar, but we’d only just gone through one of the most severe thunderstorms that week we had ever experienced in Houston. Swaths of the city were underwater and our neighborhood saw 11 inches of rain in six hours overnight. We were still picking up debris.

As we drove north from Dallas toward Oklahoma City, I monitored the storms inching toward the freeway and entertained the children as he drove at an ever escalating pace. My stomach turned flips as the storms moved ever closer. Just on the other side of the state line, I told him if we could make it to Ardmore within 30 minutes, we might avoid the main line of storms. As if to punctuate the importance of beating the thunderstorms, our phones alarmed with flash flood and thunderstorm warnings and the sky lit up with incoming lightning.

As my nerves jangled, I opened up the Bible app on my phone to remind myself of the most famous storm the disciples encountered. Mark 4 tells it like this,

That day, when evening came, he said to his disciples, “Let us go over to the other side.” Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, “Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?”
He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, “Quiet! Be still!” Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.
He said to his disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?”

Oh ME of little faith. Imagining the disciples being overtaken by waves on a small boat gave me some perspective. It settled me. I began to pray. Dear Lord, please guard our car. Guard our family. Guard us as we approach this storm. Please help us make it through. Get us to the city without driving in the midst of that terrible line of thunderstorms. Send your powerful protection.

And we made it. The storms hit I-35 once we were north of them.

I prayed with heartfelt thanks for the safe arrival at my father’s house.

But then I paused. I recalled a passage from Undone I had read that afternoon on the ride up. The author tells of her and her family’s weeks of prayers as they awaited the verdict of whether her cancer had spread. The doctor called and the news was positive. She still had recovery ahead, but the cancer had not spread. She fell on her knees in thanks for the good news.

Until she received her doctor’s reply to her enthusiasm, Yes, God is good – I believe this even when we struggle to understand all of His purposes. She quickly sobered and remembered others who had received different news: Yes, God is good. It was easy for me to say it at that moment buoyed as I was with good test results. But would I still have celebrated the goodness of God with different results? Would I have testified to my confident, unwavering belief in Jesus had the test scan turned out differently.

Would I? I began to ask myself some questions: Would I have been grateful had we spent time in the center of the storm? Would my faith have reacted differently if our little family experienced flood waters rising, hail falling and wind blowing? Would God still be a good God who cares about us?

This is what I’m constantly learning when confronting storms: God is good. He’s good when He saves us from having to go through the storm. He’s still good when He stands with us IN the storm.

I don’t always understand where God is leading. Or why. I’ve stopped trying to understand with my limited field of vision. I will probably continue to pray to be delivered from the storms. But I will trust God is good and is fighting for me even in the storms.

And I know I will arrive safely at my Father’s house.

Stand. Still. Quietly.

The Storms