When I was in elementary school, I was given the assignment of writing my first essay about any topic that I chose. Somehow, I wandered into learning about the rainforest, and very specifically was drawn to the sweet sloths tucked away in the trees like hidden jewels.

The sloth fascinated me, because I loved to imagine finding one nestled in the tall trees, and hiding in plain sight. After I wrote that essay, I was obsessed with the idea of walking through a rainforest and seeing one of these beautiful cuddly animals hidden in plain sight. I practically had my bags packed, just hoping to go to the rainforest to find one for myself!

I had learned a lot about them through my research and from that point on, I always associated sloths with treasures hidden in plain sight to discover and find. I even asked my parents for a sloth for Christmas one year, but that didn’t work out lol. They didn’t go for my monkey idea either, but I recovered. 😀

I am sharing this with you, because that is how God’s promises often appear to us….as treasures hidden in plain sight. By hope and expectancy, we can search for them in our lives, and the hope of seeing them fulfilled will grow into faith, to cause them to appear.

It is like what was said about Abraham receiving his promise. Against all odds, Abraham’s hope grew into full fledged faith and that faith drew out the fulfillment of his promises.

Faith is the very substance of those things that we hope for and when we hope with persistent & enduring expectation, the hope turns into tangible faith of a true fulfillment.

Little did I know that a year and a half ago, God would take me through my own “rainforest” experience to find and receive fulfilled promises. Only the rainforest was in a very big and wild city, and in a state that was not my own.

I have been living by trust in God’s promises to be our support, our food, our home, and our protection for several years. It originally started when I was faced with an unexpected homelessness with two kids in tow, no income, and no car. To top it off, we were in a state that was unfamiliar to us and with no one who cared to help at that moment.

God rescued us by His promise and since then, He has had me finding His promises of support, like finding sloths hidden in plain sight, high in the leafy trees.

We have traveled from Florida to Michigan and now Illinois…with hopefully an ending back in Michigan. Early one morning, about a year and half ago, God woke me up very early, at 5 in the morning and He told me to follow Him to a place of tangible hopes.

We were scheduled to check out of our room that morning, because the Airbnb was booked out. I had only enough money for about night in a hotel room and we didn’t even get food money until we were well on our way.

God had me follow Him from Michigan to Illinois, all on hope and trust in His promises to be revealed, like sloths, hidden in plain sight. Things were a little rough in the beginning and the high waves of resistance were crashing in.

We moved to a new hotel every couple of days. Some days, I had to sit in the library to write on my blog, while I waited for God’s promise of room and food support to show up and rescue us. It was terrifying, especially when the food started to go low. That is when I really had to make the choice between fear and panic or faith and trust in God’s vows to support us.

I knew that there would be many huge waves coming against us, because God had shown me that there would be a storm against my promises, until every last trace of fear and disbelief was removed. He wanted me to die to my fears and doubts, so that I could blossom into the fulfillment of all His has spoken over my life. Doubt and fear are like the prosecuting attorneys that try to take our promises away. They are similar to the hungry jaguars that look to devour sloths in the rainforests.

The purpose of the long journey was to disprove the fears and show outcomes from God’s intentional love. It was a journey of healing from trauma and pain. Of course, the end of this journey comes with the promise of having our own home, but God had me move in a way that was unusual and very slow. It is like a sloth that moves very slowly, because the slowness hides him from the big cat predators and large apex birds.

The sloth has moss that grows in his fur, and that moss causes the sloth to blend in perfectly into the foliage of the rainforest. It is very rare to see a sloth, because they are so very well concealed, and camouflaged into their surroundings, but like God’s promises, although we may not see them at first, they are all around us.

The journey that God took us through had many highs and lows once we entered Illinois. We stayed in beautiful rich hotels, and we stayed in the gritty cheap ones too. We went where God showed us to go, and we moved at the pace that He moved. We have been in luxurious Airbnb apartments, and we have stayed in areas surrounded by crime and dangers.

I could have easily just went my own way and went and got an apartment, but God had shown me that the promises and His protection are contingent on obedience. His promises to be our home and our support always come through total obedience to follow His way and trust His timing and unique personal path. Those ways have not been ways that I would have chosen for myself. Yet, they always brought out better than I hoped.

I was not allowed to just make my own way. Having the support of the promise meant denying my own understanding and fully surrendering to the way that God wanted me to take. I had to lay down my life to Him and trust His guidance and His ever-present rescue of promise.

God had to teach me to put my hope in Him to richly provide all that we needed for enjoyment and refuge, and not to put my hope in money or a dependency upon people. God is the Source of all that we need, and it was a daily exercise to redirect my hope in Him to be Sovereign to deliver His promise.

Hope was what made me brave, because I trusted in God to fulfill my hopes. Such hope in His promises will never disappoint us, because His love pours out from within to deliver the fulfillment.

All that we need is within, like an acorn that holds an oak tree inside. It is not about trying to look outward to receive, or waiting for something external to happen, but it is about looking at Christ within and laying all of our hope and trust in His vows to materialize into our situation.

During these one and half years, I didn’t have any income and there was no safety net to catch us if God were to fail to show up. Yet, He never did fail. Not one night did we go without a warm place to stay and nourishing food. The closest that we came was through a teaching experience that God gave me about making choices out of fear. That lesson is on a video and blog post that I published called “The Other Side of the Fence”. During that lesson about faith and fear, God allowed me to sleep for a night in the car, but then we were given a beautiful hotel room the next morning.

It was always an adventure to look for where God had hidden the promise. Sometimes He would ask me to write on the blog, and the blessing of rescue would come through that. He has shown up with fulfilled promises over and over and over again. Even though I was expecting it, it always took me by surprise, because it would show like something hiding in plain sight.

What was not there before, would suddenly show up, and I would see God’s faithfulness to honor His promise. Other times, He would have it just dropped in my lap, as a surprise gift, like a sloth climbing down the tree right to me. There were dangers and struggles and hardships too, but God’s promises always broke through, and He always kept us protected.

Before we left, God gave me a promise that we would be surrounded in His protection and that the waves of the storm would not hurt us. I had my car stolen once and later returned within two weeks. Then two weeks after that, they stole the catalytic converter, and I was able to get that fixed as well. God timed the allowance of those attacks in a way that protected us from being on the streets.

When my car was stolen, it was during a time when we were at an Airbnb for two months, so there was a time of refuge and safety from being stranded and homeless. Three times I had my car taken away, and every single time that it happened, God allowed it during a time when we were paid for at a hotel and we were never left outside in the elements or without refuge. God always brought my car back to me. It was like a boomerang, and attacks were returned to the place they came from without hurting us.

There were also times when the room money didn’t show up until the midnight hour, and during those times, we sat in parking lots waiting for the ever-present rescue of God. It was scary and hard not to get distracted by the troubles that surrounded us, and it took a consistent, deliberate effort to look to God within to come through.

God told me before we left that He was allowing the storm, so that I could learn to have true peace in His Sovereign power to keep His word and protect us from the storm, and not try to find peace by controlling my environment.

There was much turbulence at times, because I always had an issue with control, and God wanted to teach me to find true peace from Him, as the Source of our needs, and the foundation of our promise. That way, when the storms came with winds that beat against us, our foundation would not crumble, because it was built upon the ROCK of God’s word.

After every low time, God blessed us with a time of luxury in a fancy, high place. We just got to a high rise city apartment for the holidays that is so lovely, but that was after enduring several months in a place that was low and engulfed with difficulty. God gives us blessings of high times after every low, difficult time, so that we can recover and enjoy being pampered as His royal children.

Through the highs and the lows, God’s promises always came out and every single time, my hopes would come true. Sometimes my prayers were answered instantly, and other times, I had to engage my faith with child-like imagination as a way to press through the warfare for days on end.

When we hope in God’s promises, and engage all of our senses into believing that we have them NOW and not later, then we will find the fulfillment hidden in plain sight, like finding furry cute sloths tucked in the trees.

We can celebrate in the times of hardship because it causes us to develop endurance, and our patience must be fully developed before we see the fullness of all that was promised. It is through that faith refinement that we learn to expect and anticipate God’s goodness. When we can rest in the end outcome that was promised during the contrasting and opposite outer troubles, then we have mastered the level of faith that is unstoppable.

I needed a ton of help with trust and God knew that. So He took me on a very slow path, like sloth that moves slowly to stay hidden from predators. God’s promises have prevailed through the storms that came against us, like a sloth that is so strong that he can withstand the force of a jaguar trying to rip him out of a tree.

There were times when God would have us move from hotel to hotel every 3 days, to protect us from dangers, and there were times that we stayed in the same hotel or Airbnb for 2 or 3 months. There were times when the resistance was so strong, like tornado force winds, that it seemed and felt and looked impossible to survive. Yet love would always save the day.…

God has the path to promise all planned out and He has prepared for every need in advance. His presence travels with us. Going slow is for your protection, and if God has had you wait longer, then you can trust that your fulfillment times will be even bigger and better than most.

When you cannot see the fulfillment of your needs, the biggest temptation is to become worried, or frantic with fear. That is a very dangerous crossroads that can lead to bad outcomes. Usually when those times hit me, I would have this urge to try to make my own way and start begging for help from whoever I could find.

However in the midst of those anxious fears, God would show me to just take a deep breath, close my eyes, and allow myself to feel and imagine my promise. We find the fulfillment by faith in believing that we already have in the present moment, and not by trying to get there or obtain it as a future fulfillment.

One time, I was down to nothing left and I decided to look to God within for the fulfillment of my hopes and not allow myself to panic about how it looked in the present situation and how we would survive.

So I closed my eyes, and imagined God showing up with His promise. I allowed myself to feel the relief and the joy that it had been done, and I started to relax into a place of rest that was almost asleep.

As I was in that state of resting in God to be my Source, I saw a vision flash before me of a phone app and with the words that read “Your money store”. I was so surprised to see, that I opened my eyes suddenly and looked around.

I curiously looked at my phone and there was a donation that came during my faith exercise. That little blessing was an encouragement to me to trust that God is all present and Sovereign to keep His vows. God was using that to remind me that all we need is on the inside. It was like spotting an elusive sloth under a canopy of plush greens.

All that God has promised is within. His promises can appear at any moment, if you believe that they can. For those that believe that they have to wait a certain time, well those ones will wait, because that is what they believe. The trouble with doing that is when you are waiting for something to happen, then you are always going to be waiting. Because when you are waiting for something to happen, then you are unknowingly agreeing that you don’t have it. That kind of limiting belief actually delays the fulfillment.

I had a lot of special needs when it came to trust, hence the long, and slow journey. Trusting God to deliver an invisible promise into my present moment while facing life and death situations was a big ask. Yet, because God rescued me from being homeless, He was the only one I could really trust to stay loyal to me. Human love can be very frail, full of conditions framed by each person’s own beliefs, inconsistent, and cut off, but God’s love is unchanging and strong. So I am building my home upon Him and His promises and just trusting in each step that He has me take on the rest of this journey.

If I had not taken this slow and long road with God through such an exhaustive high and low journey, I would not be able to trust Him to hold us up and keep His promises. God will control the timing of when it is revealed, but it is up to each one of us to believe that the promises are already ours, and not needing to be obtained.

Trust the pace that God has taken you through. Rest in the outcome of your hopes and those hopes will show up like gifts hidden in plain sight—like sudden sloth sightings–-being unveiled like cuddly gifts right before your eyes. It will all unfold just the way that it needs to happen. God is Sovereign and has all the power to fulfill His promise right on time. Everything is under control and it will all turn out better than you hope.

Always believe that what you are hoping for can show up at any instant. To have hope is to have a confident expectancy. If you always believe that something wonderful is about to happen, and that you are always receiving fulfilled promises, then you will. You will have a non-stop flow of promises being fulfilled, and they will show up like elusive sloths to bring you comfort, joy, and delight. There are secret treasures for you to receive in every part of your journey. Wonderful things are emerging even today.

Love, Dannette

https://diamondsfromthedust.com/