By Andrea Goebel
God’s Way
My son sat on the floor with Legos in hand as he stared at the instructions for building his new semi-truck and trailer set. After working quietly and steadily for some time, he cried out in frustration: “It’s not fair! I just can’t do it.”
“What is it, buddy?” I asked as I walked over to him.
“I can’t get it!” His frustration bordered on hysteria.
“Can I help you?”
No response. He kept looking back and forth between the directions and the half-built creation in his hand.
“I can try to fix it, but I need to see it, so I can figure out what’s wrong,” I offered again as I knelt beside him.
He shook his head.
“I’ll help you if you want. But you have to let me look at it if you want me to fix it.”
I stepped away to let him decide what to do.
How many times in life do we respond to God’s offers of help similar to how my son reacted when I offered to help him rebuild his Lego set?
God offers to help us find a solution if we give the problem to him, but we try to solve it ourselves and refuse to let go of it.
Lately, I’ve been wrestling with worry over several situations. I tell myself if I can just work through my feelings on these issues, I’ll figure out the steps to take next. I ask God to grant me calm, but I don’t trust him with the process or the outcome.
Recently, I knelt in adoration, consumed by these very same problems. I realized something then that I experienced even more profoundly when I attended Mass a short time later: in order for God to carry my burdens for me, I had to hand them over to him.
I pictured myself dropping my burdens at his feet as if they were all piled up in a heavy bag. I lay them at the foot of the cross. And I pictured him picking them up and holding them for me.
I’d always heard the Bible verse, “Cast all your worries upon him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7), but I hadn’t realized the steps necessary in truly casting my cares on him.
If I’m holding onto my worries, God can’t carry them.
Similarly, if my son won’t let me survey his Lego creation to determine whether he’s followed the instructions appropriately, I won’t be able to rebuild it for him.
We must release our human desire to control situations and give that control to God, where it belongs.
1 Peter 5:6 tells us, “So humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time.”
When we acknowledge our own lack of control and trust him with our cares, we will experience the peace that comes from knowing our all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving creator and father has us in his hands. We will experience the freedom that comes from trusting his plans are better than ours — even when we can’t predict the outcome.
When my son finally asked me to look at his Lego set, his panic left and he watched my progress excitedly. It took me a few minutes to find the misaligned pieces and reassemble them correctly. As I handed the set back to him so he could finish building it himself, he giggled with glee.
“You got it!” he shouted.
We can say the same words to our father in heaven: whatever our worry, he will care for it because he cares for us.