When You Need a Rescue

All the kids were loaded in my mini-van for a morning of errands when I heard lots of commotion coming from my 2-year-old. It soon became pretty clear that the mom voice and the mom looks weren’t enough and I needed to intervene so I pulled the van to the side of the road.

I could see immediately it was a bad move. The grassy shoulder was sloped and wet and the back of my van slowly slid into a ditch.

My kids were all safe in car seats and seat belts, though we were now tilting at a slight angle. I did what I knew to do: I called my husband.

He had a big truck but one of his clients had a bigger truck with a brand new winch he’d gotten for Christmas that he was itching to use. Within minutes, my husband and his friend arrived, hooked the winch to my van and, with the kids and I still safely belted in, pulled us effortlessly out of the ditch and back onto level ground.

Don’t you just love a good rescue?

When a friend recounted recently how her husband had stepped in to rescue her after she became overwhelmed by a project, my thoughts ran backward.

Oh how I miss that, I thought.

I cannot tell you the number of times I have wished a rescue was just a phone call away.

So often I’ve wished someone – Someone – would pull us out and set us back on level ground.

I know you don’t have to be a single mom to need a good rescue. The Bible gives us example after example of men and women needing a rescue — Joseph, David, Rahab, Daniel, Elijah, Esther, Ruth, and Job are just the short list.

Job had sure cried out for it and rightly so. He’d lost all of his wealth, all 10 of his children and then his own health, becoming covered from head to foot with painful sores.

That’s hard to even read, but here’s the kicker: Job was by all accounts a faithful man. Scripture says that he obeyed God and shunned evil.

But Job’s faith did not insulate him from the hard. That’s actually helpful for us to read.

To know that our hard comes through the hand of a good, good Father who is always, only perfect Love.

When the hard hits, the first thing we want is the way out. When will this end, our thoughts brood, and how?

Even in the midst of his deep loss and pain, Job knew how it would end.

“I know that my Redeemer lives…” Job declared, “And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.” Job 19:25-26

We have a rescue.

God may not pull us from the hard right away. While God promises His presence and provision in the hard, there may be lessons we can learn and character we develop only by walking through the difficulty.

God may not pull us from the hard at all. There may be battles we face all the way to heaven.

But we have a rescue.

We have a Rescuer who pulls us from a pit we could never get out of on our own. Not a temporary rescue from this scrape this time, but an eternal rescue.

Because my real need is not an end to the hard but a rescue from myself and the pit of my own sin.

“And it will come about that whoever calls on the name of the LORD will be delivered…Joel 2:32

“For He rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of His beloved Son…” Colossians 1:13

The best kind of rescue.

 

This post appeared first at TrueandFaithful.net.