Thy Will Be Done

And he went a little further, and fell on his face, and prayed, saying, O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt. MATTHEW 26:39

Amanda Smith had prayed the Lord’s Prayer every night since she was a small child. After her sanctification the words Thy will be done took on a meaning she had never understood, and a few months later she learned what they cost. The chapter of her Autobiography called Learning Thy Will Be Done is one of the most painful things she ever wrote, and one of the most important.

More than all burnt offerings

She describes what it is to say those words from the heart. It is to stand by your dear ones dying, “with not two dollars for funeral expenses,” with a husband and father away who might have come and did not, with no one to go to, when the heavens seem brass and the earth iron, and your own body is exhausted from work and watching and too little food. To say Thy will be done then, from the heart, “is more than all burnt offerings and sacrifice.”

And to love him with all the heart … and to love his neighbour as himself, is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. MARK 12:33

She knew what she was talking about. She had buried a baby daughter, and a baby son, in the years before. Now came her little Will. When he was three days old she had knelt by her bed and consecrated him to God, promising to train him for the ministry. She admits there was selfishness in it: she had not done this with the others, and she half thought that if she gave him to the Lord, the Lord would let her keep him.

Five weeks

At five months old he had a convulsion. For five weeks she nursed him night and day, never taking off her clothes except to change them, doing her washing in between. It never entered her head that he would die. Then one morning she found his little foot swollen, and knew what it meant. She tried to say Thy will be done, and could not.

She took him to a doctor who told her not to worry, and spent all but fifty cents of what she had on the visit and the prescription. Still she could not say it. So she resolved that she would neither eat nor drink until she could say, from her heart, the will of the Lord be done. It took from Thursday to Friday afternoon.

Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him. JOB 13:15

Then, alone, her heart seemed to sink into a deep quiet, and she could say it. It was sweet, she says, as honey. And then came a strange test. A voice seemed to say that she could have her choice: if she asked for the life of her child, she could have it as easily as turning her hand. She answered, “Lord, Thy will is so sweet, I only want Thy will.” It came again, and she answered again. Then joy sprang up in her, and she went out of the room saying, Victory, victory, thanks be to God.

About two o’clock the next morning little Will fell asleep in Jesus in her arms. She washed the body and laid it out herself. There were no tears; God, she said, seemed to dry them up with joy.

Sinking into the will of God

What are we to make of that? It would be easy to fear that it teaches a heartless piety. It does not. Later that same morning she broke down in a flood of tears, felt she must sink, had to lie down three times before she could get dressed, and set out across the city to beg help with the burial. Her husband sent word he was sick and had no money. Her friends were busy. What she had been given was not an absence of grief but a peace beneath it that did not give way.

Nor was it fatalism. She did not believe that everything that happens is good. She believed that God is good, and wise, and that His will — even when it includes what we would never choose — is safer than ours. She learned the same thing in those years about her father, who had grown bitter and fallen away from God. She prayed for him with all her might, and was brought to the point of asking herself whether she could submit if he were lost, or crippled in a fall from the building he worked on. At last, as she put it, “I let go of father and took hold of God.” Two years later her father died at peace, sweetened, as she said, and brought back to the Lord. “What else ought we to do,” she asked, “when we bring our friends, but to sink into the will of God, and put them into His hands, and trust Him?”

Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you. 1 PETER 5:7

And I saw God

Then came a small mercy that she never forgot. On her way out to beg help for the funeral, a messenger insisted she come first to a friend in Clinton Court. The friend said simply that she had heard the baby was dead, and that if twenty dollars would help, she could have it. “And I saw God,” Amanda wrote, “and wept!”

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. PSALM 103:13

Weighing it

One caution is worth making. Her experience of being offered the child’s life, and choosing God’s will instead, should not become a pattern that grieving parents feel they must reproduce. Most Christian parents who have lost a child did not have such an experience, and did not fail God by praying desperately to the end for their child to live. Jesus Himself prayed that the cup might pass. Submission and pleading are not enemies.

But having said that, what she found is what every believer must in some way find: that there is a place beneath grief where the will of God is not a sentence but a refuge. She called it sinking into the will of God, and she found it sweet.

Blessed be God … the God of all comfort; who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble. 2 CORINTHIANS 1:3–4

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Pray the Lord’s Prayer slowly and stop at Thy will be done. Is there anything you are not willing to say it about? Tell God honestly.

2. Is there someone you love for whom you have been trying, as she said, to drive God? Let go of them and take hold of God, in prayer, today.

3. If you are grieving, do not force a peace you do not feel. Pray as Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, honestly, and ask for the refuge beneath the grief.

4. Be someone else’s twenty dollars. Is there a family near you facing a death or a crisis without means? Help them this week, simply and without fuss.

5. Read her chapter Learning Thy Will Be Done in the Autobiography, slowly, and pray for parents who have lost children.

A PRAYER

Father, I have prayed Thy will be done since I was a child, and I have not always meant it. Teach me to mean it.

Where I am trying to drive You, help me to let go and take hold of You. Where I am grieving, meet me beneath the grief.

Let Your will be not a sentence I fear but a refuge I run to, sweeter than my own.

And make me, to someone in their darkest hour, a sign that You see them. Amen.