Hello God, Are You There?  By Arlene Hendriks.

I will praise the name of God with song and shall magnify Him with thanksgiving.
And it will please the LORD better than an ox or a young bull with horns and hoofs.
 The humble have seen it and are glad; you who seek God, let your heart revive,
the LORD hears the needy, and does not despise His who are prisoners.  ~ Psalm 65:29

I remember the day when I was kneeling to pray with a sort of fatalistic approach, as if it were a chore to be done, rather than an appointment with the God of the universe, Who loved me so much He sent His only Son to die for me, to lift the load of sin from me and transfer it to Himself, so that I could spend Eternity with Him

I knew He had done great things in my life to bring me out of the darkness in which I had walked before I met Him in my late teens, and He had cared for me (minimally, I thought) in numerous disasters down through the years, but it felt like I still couldn’t press the “help” button and count on Him being my Genie in the Bible to answer my prayers, listen to my requests, appreciate my successes, keep bad things from happening to me…

Oh yes, I prayed, but without a sense of God’s really being there or reliably hearing my prayers. I thought He was not being sensitive to how hard it was when He laid some burden on me, or didn’t answer my requests, or…

Case in point: here I was, back in Nebraska caring for my mom and her sister, my aunt. I was happy to be there with my extended family of a couple of hundred or so people in the small farming town, but it seemed the cost of being there was so drastic!  I had lost my husband to an accident, a financial disaster had left me gasping for breath, and now I was moved across the country, leaving behind the only garden I had ever successfully grown – and that only because a Mexican family I had befriended, helped me make it work.

I had walked around in the garden the night before we left for Nebraska counting the cantaloupe which would be ripened to perfection the next week!  You can’t buy cantaloupe like that in the grocery store!

And the sweet corn! As corn farmers, everyone knew that you don’t pick the corn until the water is boiling on the stove to cook it in! Now I’m stuck again with store-bought corn, days old and second-rate. Would it really have been so unreasonable to anticipate great joy in my first ever garden, and to be able to actually eat the fruit of my labors???

Would it have been too hard for You to have timed my aunt’s accident to come after the cantaloupe and corn were harvested and eaten? Would that have been so hard?

Or couldn’t You have made it happen earlier, so I wouldn’t have put all that work into the garden, only to see it fade into the distance as I drove away to Nebraska?

I would pray more if I felt Your presence or had evidence that You even hear my cries. I love You with all my heart, but life is so hard, now, with Eddy gone, and I don’t know how to do life anymore, and it seems You are nowhere around as You say You will be. Soon my mom and aunt will be gone, and then what will I do?

Then I heard it, the only response I had gotten from Him for a long time,

“Will you trust Me with this?”

It always brought me up short in my complaining tirades, with its

gentle,

non-scolding tone,

with no accusation,

no condemnation,

only a simple question which put my childish temper tantrum in its proper perspective. Were a few cantaloupes and fresh sweet corn really worth treating the Lord of the Universe like a menial slave who had screwed up?

As the enormity of my sin dawned on me, I was appalled at my arrogance.

The devil, enemy of our soul, was quick with his taunts and insinuations, but this time, my sense of the Lord’s presence was stronger.

“Will you pray to Me even when you think your prayers are going no higher than the ceiling? Will you write your prayers in a book, so you will stay focused and not drift away, or be led astray to another topic? Will you make it an intentional meeting with Me, even if I don’t respond as you hope I will?

Will you trust Me with this?

I remembered this same conversation while standing in my garden the night before we were to leave for Nebraska. As I heard the question, I remember telling Him

“Yes. I love You more than 25 cantaloupes.”

Now I repeated my choice and my vow to trust Him with all my life.

I went to the local general store, bought a notebook and began to write my prayers. The discipline (and time it took) of writing my prayers began a shift in my whole relationship with the Lord. My prayer life began to be a place where I actually met with Him.

This took place within a couple of weeks of arriving in Nebraska. I was finding my heart more at peace, less frightened about my future, enjoying having my aunts, uncles and cousins drop by. One day, one of my cousins came as he was in town on an errand. He said to me, “Could you use some cantaloupes? My neighbor grows them to sell, but he had some leftovers today, and he gave them to me.”

“Oh yesss!” I exclaimed!

Soon he was back with several of them in his hands, then he said, “could you use some corn? I just picked it before I came to town?”
I was giddy with excitement as I raced to get the water boiling for dinner!

For the rest of the growing season that year and each of them for the several years I was there, we were lavished with fruit and vegetables fresh from the garden. And I didn’t have to pull a single weed!

I found that writing my prayers was helpful in so many ways to stay focused on what was currently happening and being intentional to invite Him into every struggle.

It helped me also to go back and read what I had written before and see how much the Lord was answering my prayers, only not so much in the way I had asked, but in a way where, over time, I could see His perspective in how He had answered them – even ones I had prayed years before, in ways I would not have recognized had I not had them written down so I could see what had been on my heart.

As I began to be able to recognize His voice in my thought life, seeing how His words echoed what He had written in His book, I began to get insight into His plans right at the time of my confusion and doubt. The more I chose to trust Him, the more He showed me.

One of the most exciting adventures with Him has been our walks down Memory Lane. Sometimes when I am triggered, and a particular scenario from the past springs up, as I am scrambling to shove it back into its hiding place, I hear, “Will you trust Me with this? Would you like to be rid of that lie?” At first, my answers were, “Not now!”

but one day, I said, “Yes”.

Here’s what He showed me that day. During my junior year in high school, I was becoming more and more frightened about how I was going to survive life. I was convinced that I was not worth much and would never succeed at anything. I don’t remember why I decided to take print shop, except that it would probably be an easy class with no homework! When I arrived for class the first day, I found I was the only girl. I remember thinking that maybe I could get to be friends with the boys since we were a small group of a half dozen or so.

We were learning how to set type by putting letters in the form of metal type pieces by hand into a composing stick to make words and lines of type.   When we finished the assignment for the day, we were free to go back into the classroom and “hang out” until the end of the period. It only took a few days for me to know these boys were not going to accept me into their fraternity. They were rude, crude and lewd, making sure I knew I was not welcome in the class.

So I went out into the main shop area and asked the shop master to teach me some more skills.  I was actually a very good typesetter, and soon I was creating simple documents. Then he taught me how to operate a hand-fed printing press, and I became quite proficient at that task. I really liked the work and enjoyed being skilled at the tasks the shop master taught me.

But at the back of my mind the hurt of the boys’ rejection and disrespect still lurked.  Perhaps if I were prettier, smarter, or whatever, they would have liked me. So, I thought I’d better not trust my abilities because it was just a fluke that I was good at these simple tasks.

I moved to California with my parents soon after graduation. My dad had gotten a promotion and was sent to San Francisco for his new job, and I didn’t want to be left to fend for myself in the mid-west. But I couldn’t find work, and I was floundering trying to figure out life.

Some missionaries returning from the mission field came to my church, and they told me about the headquarters of their mission. I found out that they had a print shop, and I might be able to get a job there.

So I wrote a letter to the organization. I received a reply that they did need someone to operate the very machines I had learned to operate, and they offered me a job. The missionaries who were traveling through gave me a ride back with them.

I was very happy working in the print shop, but the lies attached around the boys’ behavior were still fresh, keeping me bound by the “never be good enough” lie.

Throughout my life, whenever I brushed against the memory of their taunts, I feIt the shame of my definition of “not good enough”.

Recently, (70 years later) that memory was triggered again by something. But now, I am much more prepared to resist the schemes of the enemy of my soul. I also know how to partner together with the Healer of my heart when these things come up. So I went to Him, sharing how disappointed I had been with their rejection, and wishing it could have been different.

Then I heard Him say,

“That wasn’t a rejection; it was a redirection.

I didn’t want you to relate to those boys. They would not have been good friends for you. The shop master was My servant, a safe man, who could teach you the skills you would need for your first job.” Then He showed me a trail of events connected to being in that location at that time to meet those people, who led me to another place where I met my future husband, and how that was the means by which we went to a foreign country to be medical missionaries.

He told me that at the time the events happened, He wanted then to erase the false “evidence” of my worthlessness, but I wasn’t ready yet to receive His healing. So He had stored up His goodness for all these years, until I could hear His voice and would choose to trust His Truth to dismantle the works of the devil and set me free indeed.

I felt the burden of “less than” drop off of me, and His reminder that I was really very good at the printing job, and it was, in fact, a precursor to my learning to use the computer, which is now my joy and delight by which to create documents.

“Oh how great is Your goodness which You have stored up for those who fear You; which You have prepared for those who take refuge in You, before the sons of men.” ~ Psalm 31:19

It’s been an amazing journey to walk with Him as He points out some past incident I may be grieving over, or some disappointed expectation, or…

From a distance, without the drama in my heart, I can see more clearly what He was up to in so many places where I had judged Him to be not caring or even interested in what was going on in my life.

Now, from the vantage point of decades later, His forgiveness was powerful as He revealed how He had been leading me to maturity in everything He allowed.

~   ~   ~   ~   ~

Arlene Hendriks is the author of Treasures Out of Trauma book and videos. This story is from her collection of Time Leap Conversations with God.