So. Chicken fajitas with Staci and Jesus last night. Confession by me of lots and lots of feeling bewildered by life lately. By God, even. What-am-I-doing-wrong feelings keep tangling with Avoidance because Do-I-really-want-to-know feelings are also vying for supremacy.
Into this mental/emotional/spiritual melee dropped this pearl from the Stace (and I paraphrase): we get so focused on discovering God's will for our lives that our perspective, understandably self-centric, blinds us to the larger picture. Which is Bigger Than Us. Instead of looking to the Bible, then, only for answers to the "What does God have to say to me about this situation" questions, we should be opening the pages to see what kind of Person this is that even the wind and the sea obey Him. It's His story, not ours. This unparalleled Book does not hold merely the key to Life, the Universe and Everything, it holds the spelled-out character of God. The Character that, yes, voluntarily adopted us through a heart of staggering love, but which has Its very own plans. Which may or may not include our immediate relief/satisfaction/rescue. (The marvel is that His so-great Love compels Him to be bent by our prayers.)
So when disappointment seems to have got loose like a bull in a china shop, hardships over-run, sorrows threaten, and chaos reigns, please, remember, and remind me, that it is not about bending God to fix what is (or appears to be) broken, but about realizing God will be God, with or without you your consent, and that He is working everything to His own good ends.
P.S. And you can relax about it because I mean it-- they are good ends.
2 comments:
That's one of the reasons I love "the Jesus Story Book Bible"; and I quote, "Now, some people think the Bible is a book of rules, telling you what you should and shouldn't do. The Bible certainly does have some rules in it. They show you how life works best. But the Bible isn't mainly about you and what you should be doing. It's about God and what he has done."
God certainly uses you often to remind me to shift my perspective of life off of myself and back onto Him. So I thank you once again; I needed that.
Yes and Amen.
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