Dear New Life,

As we are fresh off our Mother's Day celebration from yesterday, I somehow find myself thinking about the contest of wills that occurs between a mother and a child (or a father and child, too). I suspect we've all experienced it, and some of us have played both roles (as parent and as child).

As a child, I want the freedom to choose my own path. As a parent, I want to make sure the path my child is taking is a good one. It's always hard to have our freedom constrained, but if we trust in the goodness of our guardian, that yielding gets easier. But ... if we feel like we have yielded and the result, at least to us, looks like a bad path, it makes it much tougher to trust and to yield more. This, I think, is the task most of us have to contend with for at least portions of our Christian life. God is calling us to trust Him and to follow His guidance. At the same time, we are looking around and saying, "how can I" when parts of my life are so hard. When the good path doesn't look or feel all that good.

This is where we must make a decision about how we are going to live. Will we follow God only while the following is good? Or will we follow Him because He is good, even if we feel unsure about how our momentary circumstances are going? This seems to be the inescapable question for the follower of Jesus. May God grant you strength to trust Him, even when your heart doesn't want to.

Joel VanderSchel, on Behalf of the Elder and Minister Team