Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 1

God's Sovereignty Problem – An Opportunity to Trust

Part 1

The puddle around the drain in our unfinished basement was small, barely a foot in diameter, and no larger than the one that appeared in the same place six months earlier. It didn't look like a big deal, and it certainly didn't look like a opportunity to learn a whole new level of trusting God. But it was a big deal, and what I learned about trust was even a bigger deal.

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I thought I'd write a series of Lenten reflections this year about trusting God, what I thought it was and what it probably actually is and why I need it more now than ever. Someone reading this might benefit from my sharing, but, honestly, I really need to write this down for me, to remind myself of how big God is and how worthy He is of my trust. I usually call this series “Light Lenten Reflections” but some of these reflections will be not so light. But back to the puddle in the basement...

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We called the rooter people we had contacted six months previously and told them the puddle was back. This shouldn't be, they said. Something is going on that a simple rooting out won't fix. Within 24 hours, they had dug a trench in our front yard, from front porch, across the lawn, through the road in front of our house and into our neighbor's yard. The trench was twelve feet deep and almost as wide. The sewer pipe running from our basement no longer sloped down to the main sewer line in our neighbor's yard. Over the years, the pipe had settled in such a way that it now sloped from the main sewer line into our basement. The village engineers and various consultants were called in and together with the rooter people came up with a plan to remedy the problem – just redo the entire sewer outlet in our basement, put in 50 feet of large sewer piping that wasn't there previously, knock a hole in the foundation to raise the outlet of the pipe four feet higher than what it was previously. Oh, and because all of the needed work was on our pipe and our property, we'd get to pay for it all!

Now this story might seem like a run-of-the-mill crisis that all homeowner face now and then, though maybe a slightly bigger one than usual. But for me, it was devastating and for a short time seriously affected my relationship with God in what I've come to call His sovereignty problem. If I believe God is sovereign - and I do – then He knew all about this sewer pipe and the gigantic hole in the front lawn and He let it all happen anyway. He knew about the five years leading up to this crisis and how our life had been put on hold so many times in those years. I was not shy about telling God how really, really upset I was that this was happening now, again. Five years earlier, when my husband and I retired, we had made plans to move to the Minneapolis area to be closer to our kids and grandchildren. We started to get rid of stuff and paint rooms. Then I had a cancer diagnosis and subsequent surgery. On the road to recovery, but before I could get painting again, I had another cancer diagnosis unrelated to the previous one, and this time it was six months of chemo followed by major surgery and a year's recovery. But recover I did, and as soon as I could climb ladders again, I was back to painting. Then the pandemic hit. In addition to dealing with the problem of showing our house and looking for a new one in the midst of high Covid numbers, did we really want to make the dozen trips to Menards and Home Depot that everyone moving into a new place seems required to make? We decided to put off our move one more time.

Now, with Covid numbers dwindling, we were finally ready to sell our house. In the days before the puddle reappeared, we had started organizing our stuff in the basement in preparation for packing. We were looking at towns in the Minneapolis area we though we might want to move to. We had a realtor picked out and we were ready to put our house on the market...the house with the 50 feet of new sewer pipe in the basement that now had displaced our carefully organized pre-move packing...the house that now had a twelve foot hole in the front lawn...

...I was not happy with God...

Tomorrow

Part 2

Oh, Sweetie...