What time I am afraid, I will trust in Thee. This is the cry of your heart in this hour of anxious watching over your dear wife. The scan’s failure to detect the child stirs up a storm of fear, and you are tempted to sink beneath the waves of doubt. But here is the very point for faith to lay hold: you are not called to trust in what the eye can see or the hand can touch. The living God, the real God, is not confined to the dim sight of instruments or the reasoning of men. He who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, He who formed the child in the womb in secret, sees what is hidden from our gaze. Shall the creature’s report overthrow the promise of the Creator? Trust in the Lord with all thine heart, and lean not to thine own understanding.
This trial has come that you should not trust in yourself, not in your own hopes, your own fears, your own reading of the circumstances. To trust yourself is to build on a broken reed; it imputes falsehood to God, as though He could not be believed. But we trust in the living God, a God with a great, warm, loving heart, who comes into the midst of our affairs and does not leave us to ourselves. He is not an idle spectator. He is the God who hears prayer, and He has bidden you cast your burden upon Him. Do not say, “I will trust when I feel joy, when the next scan shows life, when the complications pass.” Trust Him for that very thing. As a sick man does not wait for health before he trusts the physician, so you, trust Jesus now, in the dark, with the whole weight of your soul’s affairs. He is able to save, to keep, to restore, to bring life out of apparent death.
You are permitted to trust Christ with this precious matter. Yea, it is your sweet privilege to rest the entire case, wife and unborn little one, in His pierced hands. Think not that your anxiety can add anything to His power. He works, and none can hinder. If it should please Him to take the child to Himself, yet He is still the living God, and our departed ones are not dead in Him; this truth gives richest consolation. But we may ask, we may plead, we may wait upon Him who performs all things for His children. Let your prayer be, “Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief.” And then, in the strength of that simple reliance, rise to the better word of Isaiah: I will trust, and not be afraid. This is several stages beyond the first. Fear may knock at the door, but faith keeps it barred. Trust Him with a million souls if you had them; He is that mighty to save.
So go now, and leave your wife and the hidden babe in the Father’s keeping. He that neither slumbers nor sleeps will be her shade upon her right hand. The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. Rest there, and be at peace.