In His Court
Then the ball is in your court. I don’t know what to do.
That was my straightforward response to God in May of 2005 after he had unmistakably impressed specific words on me in such a conversational manner that he just about took my breath away.
He had made it clear I was to continue homeschooling even as a single mother of three, while trying to navigate immense grief and uncertainty and while becoming the sole financial provider for my family. His intimate words became an anchor throughout our homeschooling years when I could not do or be enough as a parent, much less as an educator. I do not know why I responded the way I did that day, but he has used my own words to teach my heart.
The whole story is for another time, but while I was thanking him for keeping his word through our homeschool years, he was busy doing “exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” You see, higher education was a subject I never broached; in fact, my oldest is the one who first brought it up. And she graduated from college in 2016. My second did so in 2019. And my third one, the one I was always the most concerned about because there was only so much of me and it seemed she always got the least, the one who grew up with a science brain under a homeschool mother who has an English degree, the one I whose entire educational foundation I was most concerned about, will finish her undergraduate degree this month, May 2020, with a double major in Biology and Chemistry. And I have a file drawer full of awards and honors documenting that all three finished at the top of their class. And they all finished with no debt. Am I proud of them? You cannot even imagine how much!
But this is not about them. Nor is it about homeschooling. Nor is it about education in general.
The words I spoke to God that day in 2005 had not come to my mind for a long time. After all, that whole conversation was related to homeschooling and we finished that four years ago. But one day recently, I was very emotionally thanking God for his abundant goodness in guiding and helping all three to obtain a higher education, and he impressed on me, again in conversational style, these words, “Well, you did leave their education in my court.” There went my breath again! And as I knelt in a puddle before him, my heart, which is now navigating other seeming impossibilities as all of our hearts do at times, gained a clearer picture.
Though not easy, it is simple. We are to enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise, and while there, in his court, we are to make our requests with thanksgiving. And those extremely heavy burdens and cares, including those it seems HE gives to us? We are to cast those on him, even if we must do so daily, which means we are to leave them there, in the safest of places… in a place where they will not be forgotten… in a place where they will be handled in such a way that just may take our breath away.
He will take care of the matters we leave in his court.