In Desperate Need

I am in desperate need of a snuggle and a sleep-over with my granddaughter.

I am in desperate need of a good cry, the kind that leaves me not empty but cleansed.

 I am in desperate need of a Sunday family dinner, with ALL the seats filled.

I am in desperate need of connection.

I am in desperate need of forgiveness.

I am in desperate need of…

In this current situation of isolation and limitation, there are so many things I can think of to add to this small-scale list. Things that are real, heart-hurting needs and even the paltry me-focused needs of wanting to be pampered and preened over.

The Random Unabridged Dictionary defines the word “desperate” as feeling, showing, or involving a hopeless sense that a situation is so bad as to be impossible to deal with.

Right now in this suspended life, these needs seem pressing and at times smothering and maybe even desperate. That is my humanness in a season of limits, and in a season of lack of control over events and circumstances. My own strength cannot handle my needs, small and large.

My greatest and all encompassing, desperate need is that of a Savior.

These needs, listed above, are temporal. Fleeting. Transitory. My truest deepest need is surrender to a God who will meet ALL my needs. I do not have the power to overcome on my own, nor will I ever conquer this need and hold it at bay. “For I know that nothing good lives in me. I want to what is right but fail so miserably.” Romans 7:18. I want do those things that are right and good and pure. I want to have hope, and share it with others. I desperately want to be the woman, the wife, the daughter, the Mama, the Nona, the Mother in Law, the friend that I was created to be. I struggle when I fail, fall short, see only my own needs instead of those around me. Focus on comforting myself. I struggle, I stumble. I so often carry the weight on my own.

I try. I bargain. I do-over. I am desperate.

But, ahhhh sweet Jesus there is hope in my desperation. There is no other God besides Me, A righteous God and a Savior; There is none except Me.“Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth; For I am God, and there is no other,” says the Lord of All. Isaiah 45:21b-22. 

How could it be this simple, and yet so hard, to surrender my desperation to Him. In the never ending yearning. The struggle we feel to have and do and be. To accomplish. To perfect. The age-long desires and the uncountable numbers of failures of doing it all on your own. Our struggles are not unique, they are present in every woman. They were present before the epidemic, and they will be present when this time of travail is locked in historic annals.

I look to those who were long ago God’s chosen people. They struggled and faltered. The sinned in their lack of trust and lack of faithfulness. The turned their back on God, even though He had been ever faithful and ever forgiving. My struggles, it seems, are not uncommon to woman [man].

Say, therefore, to the sons of Israel, ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the desperate burdens you carry, and I will deliver you from bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. Then I will take you for My people, and I will be your God; and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who brought you out from under the desperate burdens. Exodus 6:6-7. 

And so, in my present desperation, in my future desperation I will call on the Lord God who is the only one who can meet me in my despair. In my fear. In my uncertainty. In the insecurity of the present day. In the unknown of decades into the future. I will trust in you Lord God. I will trust in you. Again, and again, and yet again. I will call for I am in desperate need of ALL of you Lord God.