A Mother Dependant --Ariel Allison

“These all wait and are dependent upon You, that You may give them their food in due season.” Psalm 104:27

I can laugh about it now, but it was not funny at the time.

“If you want to check a bag at this airport, you need to be here an hour and a half early,” the woman at the ticket counter said. (For the record, I got there at six in the morning. My small municipal airport is not even open at 4:30)

“Excuse me?” I said, mouth agape, as I stood there with my five week old baby, a car seat, a stroller, a purse, a diaper bag, a laptop, and the suit case I needed to check.

She was in no mood to argue. “You have about ten seconds to decide whether you want to get on this flight with no bags or not fly out today at all.”

And I understood one thing very clearly in that moment.

She was the Devil.

It was one of those impossible choices. I couldn’t board that plane without that bag but I couldn’t miss my flight either.

Ten seconds.

So I got on that plane with my son, three diapers, a burp cloth, and a few wipes. I began to cry, sob actually, in the dark, as I sat in my seat. I was overwhelmed as I made a mental inventory of all the things that God would have to provide in the coming hours: clothing, diapers, breast pump, toothbrush, underwear, sanity.

As the plane taxied down the runway, it occurred to me that I had been stripped, quite literally, of my own strength. The next two days would be God’s and God’s alone. Dependence is not something that comes natural to me. I learned a long time ago that I would be responsible for meeting my own needs. I learned that no one would be coming to the rescue. I learned a lie, but it has been hard to shake nonetheless.

I think that God occasionally forces me into situations like this one as a reminder that not only is He in control, but He cares enough to provide a breast pump to an engorged nursing mother two thousand miles from home. Ultimately I lacked nothing during that weekend away. He provided every single thing on my mental list and more.

The truth is that God wants me to be a mother dependent, a woman dependent at all times – not just when it’s easy. He wants the same thing from you as well.


Ariel Allison writes, reads, and lives in a small Texas town with her husband and three young sons. She is the co-author of Daddy Do You Love Me: a Daughter’s Journey of Faith and Restoration (New Leaf Press, 2006). Her days are filled with toothless grins, muddy hands, and a never ending stream of words that try to find their way to her laptop. She ponders life as a mother of all boys at www.themoabclub.blogspot.com and her thoughts as a redeemed dreamer at www.arielallison.blogspot.com. She and her husband are expecting their fourth son in December.