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"MondayReflection"
21st April 2025
'Abigail Dodds'
graduate of Bethlehem College and Seminary
"God Knows What You Don't
Have"
"My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus"
Philippians 4:19
"God has promised to supply all our needs.
What we don't have now, we don't need now."
When Elisabeth Elliot (1926-2015) says it, I perk up.
I nod in agreement.
I remember her life, her murdered missionary husband, her devotion to the gospel, her absolute earnestness about Jesus, and the congruity of her words and practice, and I say, "Amen."
I wanted to be like her, because I wanted to know her God as deeply as she did - the kind of God who made every trial worth it.
I stood in the doorway of the biggest ER room at our state-of-the-art Children's Hospital.
There was barely room for me as thirteen medical staff moved with urgency.
And in the middle of it all, our 13-month-old son, looking still, pale, and lifeless.
I thought that if I was quiet and composed, they would allow me to stay near my son.
I watched them put an IV directly into his bone to get the meds into his marrow as quickly as possible.
I had learned years before (perhaps not as well as I should have) that God doesn't owe us children.
And that sometimes he takes them away after he's given them.
The simple words of Job comforted and frightened me:
"The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away"
Job 1:21.
And now, with five living children - the youngest with serious medical problems - I was faced with another plan that didn't match mine.
Watching my son's life hang in the balance was not a small-scale difference between God's plan and mine.
That night in the hospital, alone with my unconscious son and the sound of the ventilator making a terrifying sort of silence, God was reworking my understanding of neediness and flourishing.
Over the coming years, I would be faced with lots of questions about what I needed and what our family needed in order to thrive as his people.
Did I need my son to be healthy?
How healthy was healthy enough?
Did our older kids need a childhood untarnished by suffering?
Did they need a family with fewer "needs"?
Did they need me to homeschool them full-time to develop into decent Christian people?
Did I need sleep? How much?
Did I need less vomit in my life?
How coherent did I need to be in order to be a kind human?
You likely have your own questions.
What exactly does Paul mean when he promises,
"My God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus"?
(Philippians 4:19)
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This is a very edited version.
The full article and Bible references, are avaiable on request
Scroll down for the continuation of this discussion.
Abigail Dodds
is a wife, mother of five, and graduate of Bethlehem College and Seminary.
She is author of Bread of Life:
savoring the All-Satisfying Goodness of Jesus through the Art of Bread Making.
More
My son made it through that traumatic hospital stay.
So did I.
I felt like declaring victory.
We survived.
My faith was intact - even strengthened.
But one discovery of the last decade of my life has been that the big trials aren't always the test we think they are.
Somehow, we get through those Big Scary Trials.
By grace and prayers and the help of God's people, we hold on to hope in God's promises and endure.
But often, it's the little trials that follow the big ones that threaten to unravel us.
A couple years after that ominous hospital stay, when I should have been thrilled at my son's progress and how well things were going, I found myself telling God at two o'clock in the morning,
"I can't. I can't live like this anymore.
I can't do the things I'm supposed to be doing each day with so little sleep each night.
I need you to give me relief.
I need you to relent of this nightly disaster."
You see, our son has disrupted sleep because of his neurological problems.
It's improved in fits and starts, but by and large, the five years of his life have been challenging in the sleep department.
And it was this small trial that was threatening to undo me.
I was okay with being brought low - I'd been there many times - but just how low did I have to go?
I mean, I'd read Christian articles that declared, Sleep is an act of humility.
So, why would God deny me that humility?
I wanted to trust him with my eyes closed.
But God wouldn't let me set my heart on lesser needs.
We have bigger needs than sleep.
What I really needed was to read more closely in Philippians 4 in order to discover that Paul himself had gone without his basic needs met.
He says it like this:
"I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need"
Philippians 4:12
Paul faced unmet needs, and he had learned how to abound in them.
In Every Circumstance
God's ideas about our flourishing are different than ours.
In God's economy, we flourish when our need for him is met in him.
Dear brothers and sisters,
there is no circumstance under heaven that God isn't using to grow us into oaks of righteousness.
There is no need that he won't fill with himself.
The promise is really true:
God really will supply all our needs according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus
(Philippians 4:19).
There is nothing we truly need that is not found in Christ.
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