In Dependence

I remember the story well, because I’ve heard it a few times, and it’s a cool story, to begin with. When I was a baby, my mother was having hot flashes. She prayed, and asked the Lord for help. Into her mind came "vitamin E." She didn’t know a single thing about vitamin E, except that one gets it at the health food store. So off to the health food store she went, took her bottle of vitamin E to the counter, and said to the proprietor, "I’m supposed to take vitamin E. How do I take it?" He said, "Start with one a day, and slowly increase your dosage until the symptoms disappear." She did, and they did, and thus ends a great story.

Those were, perhaps, the good old days. The days when we didn’t know the answers, so we went to the Lord, and He gave us answers that worked. But then … what happened after that? Paul asked the Galatians, I believe it was, "Who has bewitched you?" And, frankly, I wonder.

The simple fact is that even I don’t know exactly where the line is drawn. We all have a calling, we all have an occupation, and it behooves us to develop expertise in that calling and occupation. It would be pretty silly of me to expect to be successful as a tax preparer if I had no knowledge of taxes. Knowledge and expertise clearly are not bad or wrong. So where is the line? Why is it that the vitamin E story, which has been followed by thirty-five years of increasing knowledge and expertise in my family regarding health, stands out in my mind as perhaps the most successful incident of all?

I think the answer may be that no matter how much we know in any area, God Himself is very much interested in our dependence on Him. I do have a fair bit of knowledge about taxes, but I can assure you that I do not—indeed, cannot—rest in my knowledge. My entire life is too big for me; any one of my dreams, each taken by itself, is too big for me, and I have several. My knowledge can’t and won’t get me where I want to go, and that leaves me … completely dependent on the Lord.

You see, while God Himself never changes, part of His unchanging character is that He never does exactly the same thing in exactly the same way. He makes every one of your children different—so even if you did raise them all exactly alike, you’d get a different result from each one! We like to make everything into a science, so that we can get our own answers and solve our own problems, but God throws us a curve every time we turn around. He doesn’t do this to be mean; He does this to keep us dependent on Him.

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