Their needs aren’t impossible to meet.  It just seems as if they are.  They may be needs that one person alone can’t provide true enough.  They are not needs that GOD CAN’T PROVIDE.

One friend texted needing $800 dollars immediately, wanting me to loan it to them and I don’t have $800 to lend or give or spend.  I don’t want to offer him a platitude, or advise him to think twice about what he has done to get to this point or even what he is asking.  He is hurting.  He has a need for shelter and safety for himself and his son.  He needs God to show up in a mighty way.

Another’s daughter-in-law is at the end of her rope trying and waiting to get the assistance and help her child needs for their medical diagnosis.  We understand her frustration, her pain.  None of us can supply what she needs either for her or her child or most of all – hope and faith that God has something better in store for them.

Another friend needs a supportive fellowship of believers to surround her and her sick husband as they face a medical crisis that looks terminal for her husband.  Instead, for whatever reasons, their church has chosen to believe gossip over truth and offer not support but condemnation.  They need to know God has not forsaken them though it appears people have.

What can I offer?  I could remind them of scripture, a dozen possibilities come to mind.  But in their needs would it come across as platitudes or band-aids for their gaping wounds instead of the healing they need?  God’s Word is not inadequate but my conveyance of it is.  My knowledge is limited while God’s wisdom is all knowing.  The word picture that comes to my mind is that they are physically hungry and before they can hear about God and His work and plan they need physical bread to quiet their rumbling tummies.

I can offer to pray for them, and I will, and that is the greatest method of meeting their needs I have to offer.  Yet I can’t control God’s will, His plan, His timing, His thinking or even His choice of meeting their needs even though it seems to me and them their needs are immediate ones, not ones that can “wait”.  God moves in His time, not ours.  God knows what we do not.

I can offer to be supportive – as supportive as texting and Facebook allow but I can’t travel hundreds of thousands of miles to physically meet their needs.  But God can.

For all of us, whatever our needs, GOD CAN and GOD WILL in our darkest hour, in our deepest hurt, in our scariest moments GOD SHOWS UP!

Where I can’t

God can

Where I lack

God has

Where you seek

God provides

Were evil reigns

God triumphs

Where you walk

God is beside

Where you seek

God resides

Where you reach out

God reaches down

Where you exhaust

God still stands,

Where you can’t

God can.