There are things God does that we will never know about—at least not this side of eternity. I was reminded of that recently in a way that nearly knocked me off my feet. Literally. I was baking in my kitchen and opened a cabinet I don’t often use. The smell of gas hit me so hard that it almost made me vomit. Behind the cabinet, a gas valve had been leaking, and based on how overwhelming it was when I opened the cabinet door, it had been there for a while. It took my neighbor coming down to get the stuck valve turned off.
And as I stood there letting the reality sink in, one thought kept rising to the surface: I light candles in my kitchen. Regularly.
I had smelled faint traces of gas for months before—here and there, enough to notice—and I had reasoned it away. Probably just the stovetop. Probably nothing. I hadn’t known. But God had known. And every single time I struck a match in that kitchen, His unseen hand was there.
I began to thank God because I know, without a doubt, He protected me. We talk a lot about what God does in our lives that we can see—the provisions, the healing, the door that opens at just the right time. And we should. Those things are worth every word of praise we can offer. But there is an entire unseen dimension of God’s protection that surrounds us every day without our awareness of it at all. The psalmist wrote:
He will not allow your foot to be slipped; He who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, He who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade at your right hand. The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve you from all evil; He shall preserve your soul. The Lord shall preserve your going out and your coming in from this time forth, and even forevermore. (Psalm 121:3–8)
God will not allow our feet to slip. That’s not passive. That’s active, present-tense intervention. God is vigilantly at work on our behalf. He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t get distracted. He doesn’t step away. While I was blissfully baking, and lighting matches, and reasoning away faint smells of gas, He was keeping me safe. I think of it as God’s way of saying, “Not today, satan!”
As I sat thanking God for His hand in this, He brought to mind the harder things I’ve walked through recently. A couple of prolonged illnesses that wore me down. My furnace going out in the middle of brutal heat. Multiple stressors stacking up. I felt the weight, the weariness, and the wondering of when the relief would come.
But God, in His quiet and steady way, reminded me that those hard things I knew about were not the whole picture. For every trial I was aware of, there was a long list of things He was actively preventing that I knew nothing about. Not only could it have been much worse, it would have been, apart from His hand. Job, in the depths of his suffering, declared:
“But He knows the way that I take; when He has tested me, I shall come forth as gold.” (Job 23:10)
And the apostle Paul, writing from prison, chained to a wall, stripped of comfort and freedom, could still say:
“I have learned, in whatever state I am, to be content: I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:11–13)
Contentment comes through the discipline of recalibrating—of deliberately choosing to account for what God is doing and what He is preventing, rather than only focusing on what is hard. Paul and Job knew this. And I am still learning it.
And…to be clear, the awareness of God’s protection didn’t just move me toward gratitude; it moved me toward urgency. We are not simply surviving from trial to trial, waiting for heaven. We are the boots on the ground of the Holy Spirit. There is a very real spiritual war happening for the souls of people around us. We are critical in that effort. Everything we do—every hard season in which we choose to give Him glory—is a vivid picture for those who are not born again.
“And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28)
“All things” includes the gas leaks, and the furnace failures, and the seasons of illness. My friend, your hard thing does not have to be wasted. And your story—the whole of it, the trials and the rescues you didn’t even know happened—is meant to glorify Him and draw others to Him.
So today, whatever you’re going through, I want to invite you to pause before you read another word and do something that might feel counterintuitive: Give God thanks. Thank Him for what you can see. Thank Him for what you cannot. Thank Him for the matches you’ve struck over leaks you didn’t know were there. And then commit—commit to letting every hard thing become a greater opportunity for Him to write His story through you and for you to give Him every ounce of the glory He is due.
“In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” (1 Thessalonians 5:18)
Not FOR everything. IN everything. In the illness. In the heat. In the gas leak. In all of it, give thanks, because God is present in all of it, working, keeping, protecting, and sustaining. Praise be to God!
Prayer:
Father, I confess that I have been far more aware of what is hard than I have been of the catastrophes You are preventing. Forgive me for the times I have measured Your faithfulness only by what I can see, when You are working constantly in the unseen places of my life—preventing, protecting, and sustaining me. Thank You for keeping my foot from slipping when I didn’t even know the ground was unstable. I choose today to give You thanks—not just for the blessings I can name, but for the countless things You have prevented. And Lord, set my heart on fire for Your glory and the message of the Gospel. Use my story—every hard chapter of it—to bring glory to Your name and to draw people who don’t yet know You into Your kingdom. I trust You with all of it. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
