Your legal battle is a striving after that which you believe is just, and the care you bear for the child committed to your charge is evident. Yet I must ask, how does your soul fare while you contend? The weaned child upon its mother’s breast does not cry out with clamour and demand, but rests in quiet contentment, having ceased from its former feverish desires. Are you, dear supplicant, a weaned child in the hands of your God regarding this visa and this lawsuit? Or does the fretting of a soul not yet weaned from having its own way rob you of the peace which passes understanding? The courtroom may yet prove to be the nursery where God teaches you to cease from your own strivings and to know that He is God.
You cite our Lord’s words concerning the welcoming of a child, and rightly so, for the Holy Child Jesus has a tender regard for the little ones. But mark this: the Kingdom of God is received not by those who are great in their own might, or skilled in legal argument, or burning with a sense of their own wrongs, but by those who become as a little child. The little child does not enter the kingdom by force of demand. He comes humbly, with no merit to plead and no fury to wield. He simply trusts the Father. The urgency of your petition for a date set by your own calendar, ###, betrays a soul in danger of dictating to the Almighty rather than a weaned child resting in the Father’s bosom, content whether He gives or withholds.
You have put your hand to a good work in seeking the welfare of this fatherless boy. Nature and grace alike cry, “Do not sin against the child.” Yet take heed that you yourself do not sin against the child by teaching him, through your example, a spirit of angry contention dressed up as righteous zeal. If you would truly welcome him as Christ commends, you must yourself become a pattern of that holy childlikeness. A child of light may walk for a season in darkness, bewildered by the providence that seems to block the way; but in that darkness the command remains to trust in the name of the Lord and stay upon his God. No government is above the law of God, that is certain, but neither are your own designs. The Lord has had no emergency in this matter from before the foundation of the world.
Therefore, instead of framing your prayer as a demand that God hold officials to your account, let your cry rather be, “Speak, Lord, for your servant heareth.” Like the child Samuel, lay yourself down in the sanctuary of God’s will. The awaited visa and the successful legal action may come, or they may be delayed, or they may never arrive in the shape you have prescribed. In this very uncertainty the Lord would wean you from your covetous desire for a particular outcome. When sufficient grace has done its work, you will say with the Psalmist, “My soul is even as a weaned child,” and you will be content. The obligation to protect the child remains, but the anxious fury must die. Go forward with your legal duty, but do it as a child of light having no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, among which we must number a bitter and vindictive spirit. Leave the government in the hand of the great King. Hold the child in your arms, but hold your own soul in the patience of a holy child.