This post is a combination of thoughts from the last two emails I sent out to our prayer list. If you already read those emails, you can ignore this post. If you don’t get those emails and would like to, you can sign up here.

Here's what I know, God is good all the time. No matter what.

Like the Spurgeon quote above, these are statements of surrender and trust. Most of the last decade for me has been about surrender and trust. It's not a lesson I've mastered, but it's one I've had an awful lot of experience with, and I think I've gotten good at accepting what is, grieving when things don't go the way I want or the way I had hoped, and surrendering my desires over and over again. At least in terms of Bryan's cancer. 

But, lately, I'm hearing the Spirit whisper that there's more. He is not just the God who asks us to surrender. He is not just the God who takes.

He's not just the God who asks us to accept what is. He is the God who changes what is.

Here's the thing, I can write that and on some level believe it, but it's not really the God I've experienced. The God I've experienced is the God who offers love even in the midst, right in the middle of our lament. The God I've experienced is the God who demands all of us, who is jealous for us, who wounds in order to heal, and tears down in order to build up, who doesn't bend his will to mine, but asks me to bend mine to his.

But, here's the thing I'm realizing, if this is the only side of God I know, experience, and believe in, it is incredibly easy for me to become hard, closed off, and detached. I don't think that's what God wants for his children, it's not what I want for my children. 

Yes, God does demand my surrender, he does take. He does not owe me anything and I am not entitled to anything from him. He asks me to accept the hard and meets me tenderly with love right in the middle of it. Sometimes, maybe most often, he says no to our prayers. He doesn't take away the hard, instead, he asks us to walk right through the middle of it. All of that is true, or has been true for me. 

But, the whispers I'm hearing lately are pressing me to believe in a God who is all that AND more. A God who doesn't owe me anything, but does still sometimes do exceedingly and abundantly more than I ask. A God who delights to say, "Yes." A God who may at times leave us in Egypt for generations, and at other times part the Red Sea and make a clear path out. Who might sometimes ask us to wander in the desert, and other times tear down the walls of the city and provide a place to inhabit with just a shout.

I don't know why sometimes it's one way and other times another. But I'm realizing, I'm scared to ask for a different way.

The first few years Bryan had cancer I desperately needed to learn to surrender, to bow my strong will to a will that was stronger. I needed to learn to accept the cup that was offered and find God in it.

Now, I'm wondering, if I've bent so far that I've forgotten that God is not just good in his rightness when he says no, he is also a good father who longs to say yes to His children.

I'll be honest, for a long time I stopped asking for much more than "your will be done." That was the prayer I needed, but perhaps I lost something along the way, something of the innocence of the widow who knocks and asks incessantly for what she wants, who in so doing gets the judge to bend to her will through her persistence.

This is a story that doesn't resonate with me, I struggle with it. I want to tell the widow to move on with her life, to surrender to the higher authority. There's something in it that feels a little unhealthy, this asking and asking, it feels almost delusional. But, I think there's something for me in this story as we move into a new year.

I don't really know where I'm going with all this, except to say that there's some tension I think I've lost, that I'd like to take hold of again. Some ability to see God as both and... Some ability to both surrender and hand over our desires, and still hold on to desires and ask persistently as well. I'm not sure how to do this. Maybe you know better than I do.

All I can say right now is I think I need to ask God for a miracle and that terrifies the hell out of me. It goes against the very image of God I've built up in my head. But, if I know anything about God it's that he's always about tearing down our images and breaking out of our boxes. Perhaps the God we need is always the side of God we don't know and haven't experienced yet. 

This week someone told us they felt God had told them He wanted to heal Bryan this weekend. I never know what to do with things like that, but I recognize the courage and vulnerability it took for this person to share.

I celebrate that.

Listening to the voice of the Spirit is awkward and uncomfortable, it’s even more awkward and uncomfortable to act on those promptings. For good bible-thumping evangelicals, who have been raised to value the Bible more than the Spirit, I think it’s even more uncomfortable. But, Jesus tells us the Spirit is our Helper, our Counselor, our Guide. So, this is also part of following Jesus — listening and responding to the Spirit. 

Bryan and I have been talking and praying about what this person said. There were specifics of what they shared that we wanted to take seriously, but that we didn’t feel fit with things we were being directed towards, or that we were hearing in our own walks. What do we do with that then? 

How do we hold space for the Spirit to speak to us, while also recognizing and valuing the voice of the Spirit in another? I’m really not sure. 

Here’s what I do know though… 

I know that God has been prompting me to pray more specifically for healing, for a miracle. As I already shared, this has been an uncomfortable prompting for me.

But, I’ve been thinking a lot about the story of Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane. He doesn’t just pray, “Your will be done” he also asks that “this cup be taken from me.” 

This always felt incredibly strange to me. Isn’t this why Jesus came? Didn’t he know this was coming? Wouldn’t perfect surrender and trust be to accept what was to come without even asking for the cup to be removed? 

But, that’s not what Jesus models for us. 

And this is the dichotomy that I find myself wrestling with. I have struggled and fought to surrender into the second half (“not my will but yours”) and now find God gently reminding me that I’ve neglected the first half (“take this cup from me”). 

Either one without the other is incomplete. 

To ask alone — no matter how powerfully, or how much faith is behind it — without surrender, is, indeed, entitlement, not much different than children writing letters to Santa Claus or throwing tantrums to try to get their way.

But, to neglect to ask, to only ever bow, is to forget our rightful place in God’s family, it is to forget our free will (the very fact that we have desires and wants, and are not robots to God’s sovereignty), it is to be the child that cowers in the corner afraid to ask the parent for crumbs when the table is heavy with a feast. 

And so, I ask you to pray for my husband. I don’t just ask you to pray for God’s will, to pray for God’s best, or to pray vaguely for Bryan’s health and well-being. I ask you to pray specifically for this tumor in Bryan’s butt to go away and never come back. I ask you to pray that God would save Bryan’s ass. 

And I ask you to pray specifically this weekend.

Will God miraculously heal Bryan and take away this tumor? I honestly can’t say.

What I can say, is that I’m learning, slowly, ever so slowly, to hold two opposing things in my hands at the same time. To surrender completely, without letting go of desire, without holding back from asking, without fearing to still boldly make requests.

Grace and peace,
Bethany Stedman