5 reasons to Trust God’s Narrative Instead of Yours

A week ago, God protected me from a terrible accident.

You may know I’m out of remission with Lyme disease. On March 3, I bundled up against the cold solely to deposit a check my church had mailed me to help defray the cost of my medical expenses. (Insurance doesn’t cover my Lyme meds.)

My bank is three blocks from the highway ramp I’d normally jump on to head home.

As I exited the bank’s parking lot onto a four-lane main street, my front left tire exploded. I do mean exploded. Complete with burning rubber.

Good news: I was able to control the car. It didn’t cause an accident. No one was injured. The incredibly kind tow truck operator let me wait in the warmth of my car for a ride home and towed my car after my ride arrived.

I was grateful. God had blessed me in protecting me from horrible consequences. If that explosion had happened on the highway, the narrative would have been very different.

So why was I upset?

The outcome didn’t fit my narrative.

I had counted on that check to get me through a really rough financial patch. My car repair ate up more than half the check. Two days later, my accountant told me I’d underpaid my estimated taxes and still owed the IRS almost $1K. Poof. The check was more than gone before I’d paid a dime against my medical bills.

Our narrative, when based on our reasoning, is presumption.

I take comfort in the fact that people of God who said they would follow God’s instructions still struggled with shaping their own narrative more than they relied on God.

Moses’ had his flawed version of how to help the Israelites. Sarah wrote her own narrative to provide offspring for Abraham when she became impatient with God’s promise of a son.

Jonah’s narrative was all the reasons he shouldn’t go to Nineveh. The people are too wicked. They deserve Your judgment. (Some historians add that Ninevites had killed Jonah’s father.)

God changed Jonah’s narrative three times. He wrangled Jonah into obedience, simplified His message to the Ninevites, then revealed His sovereignty to Jonah again when he slipped back into his old narrative.

Job’s narrative was his list of “God, why?” questions. While maintaining his innocence of wrongdoing, his narrative shifted to a plea for God to be his legal advocate. God didn’t respond to either narrative but instead revealed Himself in a way Job couldn’t have imagined—igniting a deeper understanding and reverence of the Almighty than Job had had before.

This underscores five truths about God’s narrative:

1. It often doesn’t make sense when we experience it.
2. Trusting God’s narrative takes courage when our circumstances laugh at us or our doubts drown His voice of truth.
3. God gives us the freedom to trust Him more than our machinations.
4. God’s purposes can’t be thwarted, so we should accept His narrative sooner than later.
5. His narrative comes with promises of blessings.

Let’s face it. Trust is tough during a crisis.

First, we can fall into the trap of believing our circumstances represent the limit of God’s goodness toward us. Don’t listen to that lie!

Second, when we don’t experience immediate results from following His narrative, we wonder if we heard God right or He forgot what He told us. Yet His sovereign “delays” are our call to surrender to His timeline and pray with anticipation because God promises He will bless us in ways we can’t imagine (Isaiah 64:3-4).

As I write this blog, Survival Secrets (Book 2 in my series about the Wise Men) is with my publisher while I write Book 3. The book of Isaiah figures prominently in the series, so I’ve been parked on Isaiah 41 for a couple weeks. In that chapter, God calls mankind to appear in court with Him. He challenges them to present their arguments in a trial—to show evidence for how their narratives can refute Him. He knows some people will try to produce proofs to deny His existence. Others will argue there’s power in the idols they’ve crafted from gold. Others will say they know how to tell the future like God can. The list goes on.

I encourage you to read the entire chapter because God completely crushes all their arguments. Mic drop. THAT is the God we serve!

I can keep fretting about finances or quit concocting narratives in my mind. I can burn rubber spinning my wheels with anxiety or praise God for His promise to take care of me (however He chooses to play that out). A hard truth is that sometimes we cringe at trusting God past our comfort level.

If you’re wrestling with surrendering your narrative to God, I pray you’ll choose His way over “self.” We serve a great God who is worthy of our praise, adoration, and trust.

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MUSIC BONUS:
Casting Crowns singing “Praise you in the Storm” (so powerful!)