My Future Is In Your Hands

I am trusting you, O LORD, saying, “You are my God!” My future is in your hands.

Psalm 31:14-15

Because my parents died relatively young, my father at forty-seven, and Mama at fifty-nine, I’ve had some issues, some of which are reflected in statements I’ve made in the past: “I don’t worry about being put in a nursing home in my old age. Nobody in our family lives long enough to get there.” Or when my friends rushed out to buy half-price decorations the day after Christmas, I’d think, I don’t know if I’ll even be here next Christmas. Why buy more stuff?

The first statement my niece Holly described as downright morbid (although my sisters have said similar things), and after my fortieth and then forty-seventh birthdays, I realized the folly of the second statement, so I gave both those ideas and my fears to the Lord. For truly, only the sovereign Lord who created me knows how many days and years I’ll be on this earth before graduating to heaven.

None of us really know how long we’re going to live or what our future holds. We are not privy to the personal trials that lie ahead or to information about national or world events that may affect us. In light of record deficits in our nation’s economy, wars breaking out around the world, and bad news broadcast daily by the 24–7 news media, it’s normal to feel uncertain or even fearful about the future.

Yet the promise in Psalm 31 is that because the everlasting Lord is our God, we don’t have to worry about the future. He has our future in his loving hands. We don’t have to worry that we’ll have short lives because of a genetic condition in our family. We don’t have to fret about the stock market or tomorrow’s trouble. Instead, we can trust God and put our future in his hands today and every day.

Father, I’m trusting my life today and all my tomorrows to you. As I put my future in your hands, I thank you that I don’t have to worry because your plans for me can’t be thwarted!

Thank God for the unknown future. . . . How merciful God is to lift the curtain on today; and as we get strength today to meet tomorrow, then to lift the curtain on the morrow.

E. Stanley Jones(1884–1973), American missionary and theologian