We go days, weeks and months without purposely being still. When we are caught in a situation where we must wait we are bored out of our minds. We’re impatient as we wait and become crankier and more irritated the longer that waiting lasts. Some of us have ways of dealing with these times and they often involve either taking a nap or whipping out our smart phone to surf the internet, text, e-mail or something fun or work related to pass the time and feel productive.
If you find yourself admiring the One who made our souls to run on Himself, what else would you find that would be more satisfactory to your soul? If you find yourself delighting in the one who made laughter, joy and happiness, what else do you think would bring you joy in this life? Once you have delighted yourself in the Lord, I believe your heart will want nothing else besides Him.
We all know that God has a plan for our lives. I think often we’re afraid that plan will be boring or that His plan will lead us somewhere we don’t want to go. I think we often hope that God will bless our plans. That He will simply let us drive and just come along for the ride. But what if living like that wasn’t God’s plan for us? I think the concept of God’s will for our lives has left Christians divided and confused.
I got in the car to drive home just like any other day. But on this particular day… it was different. My heart was still pounding in my chest as I got in the car. I turned on the air as I drove home hoping that would calm me down. I cranked up the music. Hot tears flooded my eyes–I blinked in an attempt to make them go away. I finally pulled my car into my driveway and let out a deep sigh hoping I could convince myself everything was going to be ok.
“I’m not cut out for that ministry.” She said, reluctant to tell me “No.” “Maybe not,” I replied hoping to convince her that I felt God wanted to use her despite what she thought. “But how will you know unless you try? God often seeks out people unqualified; He often is seeking to push us outside our comfort zones, what is impossible with us is totally possible with God.” She squirmed a little, looked at me a reluctantly and said politely, “Well, I’ll pray about it.”
But then I got a letter from Moody that read, “We’re sorry but there’s no more room for you at the Moody Bible Institute”. In other words, “We’re sorry but your application wasn’t good enough and you’ve been rejected”. But, but, but, that WAS the PLAN! My thoughts raced, why had God allowed this road block? How was I going to serve God if He didn’t let me go forward with THE PLAN???
We have thoughts and ideas about what we’d like to do with our life, places we’d like to go, things we’d like to do, when we’d like to do those things. Look here, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.” How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow?
So many Christians in our day and age wonder what God’s will is for their lives. When we read Jeremiah 29:11, we wonder what plans God has for our lives. Sadly, we’ve somehow been lead to believe that we must grope about in the darkness for this secret plan God must be hiding from us, since we don’t know what it is. The first problem with this subconscious view on our lives is that if God had a specific plan for us, why would He hide it from us? If He truly loves us, which I do believe—would He hide His plan for our good from us, if we needed to know it to somehow follow it??
To me, the “PLAN” was falling apart, this was not how it was supposed to go. But let’s remember, that God’s definition of “good” isn’t always our definition of “good”. See when I think of “good” I think “happy”, “comfortable”, “cool”, “not-stressful”. But see often God’s good plan for my life is for the good of my character, and He knows that my character won’t get stretched and I that I won’t grow if I’m always “comfortable” and never “stressed”. “Many are the plans in a person’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails.” (Proverbs 19:21)
When you set your alarm for the morning, you intend to sleep soundly through the night so that when you awaken to your alarm, you are rested and ready to tackle a new day. However, you’re awaken by an unusual culprit: whether it be the garbage truck making short work of the dumpster outside your apartment, a neighbor’s dog who is looking to scare a squirrel witless or a strange dream that causes you to wake up in a cold sweat, you find your sleep disrupted by an unexpected wake up call.