Article April 29, 2019 Issue

Trusting in God and caring for our children

Heidi Kleinsmith Salter

I’ll admit it. There was a Bible story that for years I didn’t like. Found near the beginning of the Bible, it’s the story in which the patriarch Abraham is instructed by God to take his son, Isaac, up into a mountain and offer him up as a sacrifice (see Genesis 22:1–13). Two aspects particularly bothered me: that God would even make this request and that Abraham was prepared to follow through with it. Of course, the account ends with God sending his angel and telling Abraham, “Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.”

I usually try to think about how the messages in Bible stories apply to my life or to current world issues. But this was one story I just couldn’t connect with. While I knew it was probably a good lesson in loving God and being obedient to Him, I found the premise too troublesome to get much from it.

Then one day it happened. While I was listening to the story being read in church, the words “Thou hast not withheld thy son ... from me” struck a chord. I could see that Abraham’s trust in God was so great that he saw no reason to withhold his son from Him. My new take-away from this story was certainly not literal; it was inspired. And it led me to think more deeply about how I, too, could strive to trust God so completely that I did not need to withhold from trusting my children to His perfect love and care.

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