When Overwhelmed, Pray!

I was overwhelmed as I tried to slog through the corrections the city’s planning committee had made to the drawings for a home garage conversion we had undertaken. The feeling of helplessness pressed together with the hopelessness of ever making sense of the jargon. We took on this project after our daughter divorced and came to live with us. We have a very large garage that we had wanted to convert into living space for years, but it was not until recently that California law allowed us to do so. However, after receiving the document from the city, outlining at least five major hurdles for us to overcome, my faith began to falter. At the height of my frustration, my daughter, Carmen, walked in and asked, “What’s the matter?” When I showed her the documents, she simply answered, “You don’t need to stress over this. I have a friend who knows people in the city who can help us with all this—and at good prices too!” I felt ashamed that instead of turning to prayer, where the real solution to my dilemma lay, I allowed uncertainty and confusion to overtake me. In her book Life Sketches, Ellen White tells of a time when her husband, James, had to walk three miles and back in the rain to bring provisions. She wrote, “As he entered the house, very weary, my heart sank within me. My first feelings were that God had forsaken us. I said to my husband: ‘Have we come to this? Has the Lord left us?’ ”* She could not hold back the tears “and wept aloud for hours”† until she fainted. The very next thing she writes is: “Prayer was offered in my behalf. Soon I felt the cheering influence of the Spirit of God, and regretted that I had sunk under discouragement.”‡ How silly and inconsequential my little “crisis” seemed after reading this testimony from a mighty woman of faith! And how faith affirming to know that prayer lifted her—and can lift you—from the pit of discouragement.

Lourdes E. Morales-Gudmundsson

* Ellen G. White, Life Sketches of Ellen G. White (Mountain View, CA: Pacific Press®, 1943), 106.

† White, 106.

‡ White, 106.