As a parent, I can find peace with not being able to protect my children in everything. While it pains me to know that my children will experience the harsh and sour world more than I’d ever want them to, I know that it is God’s way of revealing the incredibly soft and sweet contrast of the gospel. ~ Laura Wifler
My friend’s daughter, Emily, kept a journal for her future husband.
Long before Emily met him, she prayed for him and wrote down prayers. For years her journal entries grew — until one day she finally met Luke.
A few weeks before their wedding, Emily shared this journal with Luke. She gave it to him as a gift. What jumped out as her fiancé read through it was a passage from the Bible that Emily had prayed years earlier in one specific season. It was a chapter that God placed on her heart: Isaiah 49. It’s a long poem that isn’t commonly heard or shared. Here is an excerpt:
Shout for joy, you heavens;
rejoice, you earth;
burst into song, you mountains!
For the Lord comforts his people
and will have compassion on his afflicted ones. — Isaiah 49:13 NIV
Unbeknownst to Emily, at this exact time in Luke’s life, he was reeling from a difficult breakup. He was heartbroken, and as his father comforted him, he gave Luke a promise from God to cling to. It was the same passage from Isaiah that his future wife was praying for him from many miles away. The passage that God placed on Emily’s heart.
While some people may call this a coincidence, I call it a God wink.1 I consider it evidence that He cares about the details of our children’s lives and is always orchestrating yet-to-be-revealed blessings behind the scenes.
At Luke and Emily’s wedding, an overwhelming warmth filled the church. The Holy Spirit was present, and watching this couple take their vows felt undeniably good. Every guest walked out of that church smiling and feeling uplifted. Joy was in the air, and when a wedding has that effect — a palpable joy that can’t be manufactured or forced — you know it’s from God. It’s a foreshadowing of the perfect joy we’ll experience in Heaven.
We can’t see it, but the Lord is always a step ahead.
He’s setting the stage for your daughter’s future using events that happen today. He walks with her and before her, never leaving her side so that she won’t feel discouraged or afraid (Deuteronomy 31:8).
What feels insignificant, random, or even devastating could be a primary thread being woven into a bigger story. As American playwright and author Thornton Wilder once wrote (and Harold Kushner discussed in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People), life is like a tapestry. As humans, we mostly see the back side. We see a hodgepodge of many threads — loose ends, knots, and random patterns. But God sees the front. From His vantage point, the threads of arbitrary events can ultimately coincide to form a beautiful work of art. Every twist and knot has its place in a great design.2 It’s all intricately woven together.
On this side of Heaven, there will always be mysteries we don’t understand, loose ends we can’t comprehend. While some events will come full circle and make more sense down the road, there will also be suffering that feels pointless, heartless, and cruel — devastation that we can’t mitigate with a tapestry analogy.
- Our deepest heartaches present a crossroads. They force us to make a choice: to trust God or reject Him.
Faith means trusting the Lord before we have all the answers. It takes courage to trust God’s plan for your life — and even more courage to trust God’s plan for your daughter.
Especially when she’s hurting and you’re praying desperate prayers, waiting on the Lord to act may be the hardest thing you do. It could lead to a crisis of faith.
It helps me to remember that God loves my children far more than I do. He knows every detail about their future. When I feel tempted to control loose ends — and frustrated by unanswered questions — I remind myself to keep trusting Him. My job is to enable, not interrupt, His plan.
The Lord works all things together for good for those who love Him (Romans 8:28). He weaves every seemingly random thread into an intricate tapestry. Learning to trust God with your daughter’s life story teaches her to do the same. Beyond the heartache and brokenness of today is a future that only He can see.
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1. Squire Rushnell coined this term in his Godwink book series, https://www.simonandschuster.com/series/The-Godwink -Series.
2. Thornton Wilder, The Eighth Day (1967), as mentioned in Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (Anchor, 2004), 21–22.
Excerpted with permission from Is Your Daughter Ready? by Kari Kampakis, copyright Kari Kampakis.
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Your Turn
There’s no protecting our daughters from everything, and it’s not our job anyway. God, who loves them more than we ever possibly could, is in full control of what He allows and ordains in their lives. Pray and trust, parents! He’s doing good things! ~ Devotionals Daily