Lesson at the Clothes Dryer

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When we replaced our dryer a few years ago, we saved $50 by buying the model without a buzzer indicating when the clothes are dry, instead of the identical model with a buzzer — not our best buying decision! Yesterday morning I went into the laundry room only to find a dryer full of clothes that needed to be hung on hangers sitting there at the end of a cycle. “Oh, me, ” I thought, “I’ve done it again,” but when I opened the dryer everything was still warm. It appeared that they had just finished. I thought maybe God had blessed me by the fact that I got there just after it stopped.

My heart immediately went back to the dark, dark days after our precious grandson Avery went home to God in 2012, a time when praying and trusting became so hard for me. I never stopped praying, but I longed to have the trust I had before. For decades, I had trusted that God worked in my life in large ways and small ways, that He answered my prayers for big things and little things. When His answer wasn’t what we had longed for after those agonizing prayers that May and June, I didn’t know what to think anymore. “Had He really listened and responded in all those big and little things?” I doubted.

As I worked in the laundry room yesterday morning, I thought about the reality that God is with us even when things are very, very tough. I have long known that things not going the way I want them to does not mean that God doesn’t love me –it actually means that He does love me. I thought about my “little blessing” of clothes that weren’t wrinkled and remembered that:

Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above,
coming down from the Father of lights,
with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow.
James 1:17

My still-warm clothes were a perfect gift at that moment.

Even God’s own Son suffered while He was here on earth. I shared this verse recently, but it is appropriate here, too:

In the days of His flesh,
He offered up both prayers and supplications
with loud crying and tears
to the One able to save Him from death,
and He was heard because of His piety.
Although He was a Son,
He learned obedience from the things which He suffered.
Hebrews 5:7-8

The question is not whether we can trust God. The question is whether we will.

Someday God Himself will indeed:

. . . wipe away every tear from their eyes;
and there will no longer be any death;
there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain;
the first things have passed away.
Revelation 21:4

Until that day, I will trust Him in the big things and the little things.

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