Life can be one emotional roller coaster. I had come home from work, feeling I had hit a new low. Well, not a low, actually. More of the ominous hang just before the steep plummet to uncertainty.
And true to form, I became anxious. Anticipating the worst.
I came home that day to find my sweating husband completing finishing touches on the deck he’d been carpentering for weeks on end. The transformation from old, rotten deck to this beautiful, so-strong-you-could-park-a-car-on-it masterpiece was nearly complete.
“I returned some items to Home Depot today,” my husband reported, as he shared the details of his day. “The girl at the checkout desk had a name tag that said ‘Daughter of the King.’
“I asked her, ‘daughter of which king?’ and she said, ‘daughter of the only king.’
“‘Ah! God,’ I answered.”
He said that prompted a short conversation about the state of this world and the importance of knowing that God is in control despite it all.
“Was her name Sara?” I asked, after my husband had completed his story.
My husband said she’d been wearing another name tag too, but he hadn’t looked at it.
“Sara means ‘princess,’ which is a ‘daughter of a king,'” I said, explaining my question.
Reflecting on that made me realize how my anxiety was not becoming of a king’s daughter, a princess, and that is what I am. I, Sara, am a daughter of the King of Kings. (If God is your father, then you also are a prince or princess.)
Anxiety isn’t becoming. Becoming anxious isn’t fitting for the daughter of a king. It accomplishes nothing except to take my eyes off my father. It demonstrates lack of trust.
The Home Depot clerk was wearing the title “Daughter of the King” and claiming the truth that God is in control. It was her testimony.
My brother and his family have one as well. Recently, he and his wife have gone through some hard times. My brother’s widowed mother-in-law died; she had lived with them for 20 years or so. In the same week, the Christian school where both my brother and my sister-in-law taught full-time, announced it was closing. Jack and Dixie now had no income, just weeks before school was to have begun.
Over the weekend, I called my brother to ask how they were doing.
“God is faithful. We will see what He will do,” Jack told me.
Families of children he and his wife had taught through the years were sending them money gifts and job leads, he told me. They were trusting God that they would be fine. Dixie already had a job offer and was going through the hiring process; he expected her to start within the week. Jack had had interviews with the public school system and was hopeful.
My brother was confident God would come through for them. He wasn’t anxious or worried.
“Just check my Facebook page for the update,” he said.
I got off the phone, buoyed by his faith. In a similar circumstance, indeed just imagining such a scenario, I might not appear as faithful — if my current default mode of anxiety continued.
A few days later, I checked my brother’s Facebook account. Sure enough, he had been offered a full-time position at a charter school teaching high school math.
But it wasn’t the fact that he’d gotten the job that touched my heart. It was his confidence, his trust in God before that fact that did. The teaching job, earning more pay and benefits, was just an additional proclamation that God can be trusted:
“Trust God! Don’t worry! He’s got this! He’s got it all.”
The message permeated to my very bones.
Lately, I’ve been rereading Fresh Faith by Jim Cymbala. In it he defines faith as “total dependence upon God that becomes supernatural in its working.” Cymbala reminds us of Hebrews 11:6 that tells us “Without faith it is impossible to please God.” He continues by saying:
“Nothing else counts if faith is missing. There is no other foundation for Christian living, no matter the amount of self-effort or energy spent. Nothing else touches the heart of God as much as when his children simply trust him wholeheartedly.”
All of these things came to mind as my husband shared his experience in Home Depot with the “daughter of the king.” I reflected on my day, my anxiety, my name and what it means. And I decided to live like the princess I am. Trusting my Father, the King of Kings.
(More to come on this.)
P.S. I love Mary Engelbreit’s artwork and have a variety of her prints in various forms — puzzles I’ve framed, my yearly calendar, and a couple of mugs, one pictured on my kitchen table in the image featured with this post. (The other pictures a woman with her hands on her hips saying “Snap out of it!”) While the Princess of Quite a Lot is clearly enjoying the luxuries of what we might imagine a princess should enjoy, she also demonstrates trust in her position with the King. She isn’t anxious. It’s a good image to mimic.
All Things Work Together 