Gideon
| November 12th, 2007You have too large an army with you. I can’t turn Midian over to them like this — they’ll take all the credit, saying ‘I did it all by myself’ and forget about me.
- Judges 7
Gideon had it tough. It’s one thing to say you trust God. It’s a whole other thing to march into battle with an army that had been whittled down from 32,000 to 300. God was teaching Gideon about trust, but there is something else going on here. It seems that God is wanting more than credit or even for Gideon to trust him. God wants to be known by him. Maybe God puts us in tough circumstances that force us to rely on him simply because he wants to be close to us and he wants us to learn to be close to him.
Think of it this way. I want Sophia to learn and grow and become strong. I want her to learn to walk on her own and feed herself and speak. But, at the same time, I long for her to be close to me, to need me. Yes, I want her to learn how to walk. But, when she comes upon a particularly precarious bump in the road and she looks at me and reaches out her hand for my help, I get this top-of-the-world, how-can-life-get-any-better feeling. Why? Because she is my child, and I want her to be close to me, to rely on me, and to need me.