Two frogs are jabbering to each other in a puddle at the base of the shrunken liner of our pool.  The pool liner shrunk after we emptied it to clean.  It took several days of interrupted effort to complete the job and by the time we finished, the very thing we were working so hard to improve, had finished it’s job against us.  The liner had drawn back up into itself past its point of usefulness.  It’s no longer big enough even to slip into the intended groove around the edge of the pool.  It will have to be replaced.  So for now, what has been a gathering place for our family and the gaiety of many loved ones, is just gathering rain, and frogs, and all the regrets of wasted effort and wasted money.

But it is the frogs that grab my attention.  First it was their calls, but ultimately it is seeing them sitting there — just sitting there.  They don’t move much.  They don’t fidget or even fuss.  They just sit.  The just sit and wait.  They don’t seem worried.  It doesn’t look as if they are trying to force anything.  They are just sitting, content to let what will come, come.

It’s the contentment.  It’s the faith to not try and force anything, but to trust that what will come, will come, and it will be what it will be.  That’s what grabs me.

God told exiled Israel, “For I know the plans I have for you…plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.” (Jeremiah 29:11-13)

The Israelites were in exile in Babylon, worrying about what was to come, worrying to the point of seeking unwise counsel from prophets and accepting lies as truth, because it felt better than waiting and not knowing.

Jesus asked, “Why do you worry…,” and I think he was genuinely perplexed by it.

Paul reminds us, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.  For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”  (Ephesians 2:8-10)

The frog can’t do what I can do.  He’ll never reflect God’s image the way I can.  He wasn’t made to, not like I was made.  But he seems to know his place.  And knowingly or unknowingly, he’s demonstrating the surrendered life — the life content to wait for that which will come, not by his choice, but by the choice of the One who already knows what’s coming.

Worry can cause us to shrink up past our usefulness.  It works against the very work God is working in us.  Waiting in faith, being still, knowing God is God, that’s the look of surrender and what transforms jabbering to praise.