I remember when I was still a child, my dad would always say when it was raining very hard, “Oooh it’s raining cats and dogs” and being the realistic child that I was, I took him very seriously. Coupled with my desire to have a pet, I got excited every time it rained hard. I remember how as a 5-year-old, I would sit at the window and watch the rain fall down hard, and wonder when the cats and dogs were going to arrive. Or waking up in the morning after a stormy night and wondering if there was a cat or a dog waiting outside for me. I laugh to myself thinking back now, but this was all very real to Rebecca as a child. I angrily went up to my dad one day asking him where my dog or cat was, and when I explained to him why I was saying so, he laughed and gently explained to me that that is just a saying. I was devastated. I couldn’t believe that my dad would deceive me like that.
Now my dad didn’t set out to deceive me, but still I felt so sad. Why did I believe him? Because he was my dad and I trusted him so much. When I was a child and I hurt my leg, I would run to my dad, and he would kiss it better, and I believed that it was better. When I was a child, my dad would throw me up in the air, and I would always land safely again in his arms. I never doubted that. If my dad told me that the vegetables on my plate were going to give me “superpowers”, I believed him. And when he told me that it’s raining “cats and dogs” outside, I took him quite literally.
5-year-old me had an almost delusional trust in my dad that pushed me to wait at my window for what he “told me” would happen.
I thought back to that lately as I’m reflecting on trusting God. God calls us to become like children and, just like I trusted my dad at 5 years old, to trust Him in a similar way. To go and wait for something that seems impossible, not because I have evidence of it happening but because I know Him and, unlike my dad (here on earth), what He tells me won’t just be a saying. It will come to pass—in His way and in His timing.
My focus back then was not on what logic was telling me but rather what my father was telling me. And I think that that is a lot like what trust in God looks like. The evidence around you might be completely contrary to what God has spoken. But like 5-year-old me, go stand at your window and have that delusional faith in your heavenly Father—that He will do what He said He will do. I’m encouraged today to take God at His Word despite what the evidence is showing me.
Numbers 23:19
“God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind. Does he speak and then not act? Does he promise and not fulfill?”
