“God had already selected the team I would be coaching. I just needed to do my current job well, keep preparing, and wait on God’s timing. I needed to trust His leadership…”
-Tony Dungy
Every time I write one of these things, I have the thought of, “this will probably be my last one…” I am beginning to think it might be somewhat indicative of a larger problem I have: namely that my vision of God’s role in my life is much too frighteningly small.
It makes me think about a story that has been on my mind a lot lately. It’s a story that starts off like any great story, with two quarreling rabbis.
The story begins when one rabbi has a prayer answered very quickly and the other prays for a large span of time without an answer from God. After a long time, the second rabbi approached the first and asked how he was able to be given an answer to his prayers so quickly.
The first rabbi thought for a while and this was his answer to his frustrated companion:
To what may the matter be compared to? I approached our God with ernst and tenacity and God has given me an answer if only to be rid of me. Perhaps God has not given you your answer because He simply enjoys the conversation?
I love that story. It just is such a different take on God that helps align my faith with what actually seems to happen in my life lately. Sometimes, God just seems to enjoy talking to me more than other times. I love and hate it.
Because the farther I go in this, the more there is. I can’t figure out exactly how to describe it, but it feels like each time I come at these keys, something scratches open in me. I uncover that not only is something still inside, but that gushes of emotions all come swirling out around me. It is a terrifically interesting thing to then take the pieces and see what picture God is putting in front today.
What is even more odd to me though is that when I go back and read some of this stuff, I always think, “I am not sure I wrote that / I really do not remember this one.”
It reminds me of a joke that we have in our family about my dad. Every movie we have ever watched, as little kids to now, he never remembers watching. I have no idea why this is. He is also of the senior citizen variety, so it is not as if he was snapchattin’ it up during the Bourne Identity…
Whenever my sister or I would talk about a movie we had watched as a family, it always ends the same way. He chimes in, “That sounds ________________ (funny/scary/exciting). I would love to watch that with you sometime!”
To which we both laugh while reminding him that not only was he there, but he was the reason it took us forever to watch it because he makes us pause it every so often and explain the plot to that point.
I never understood how something like that could happen to you, but now it makes a little more sense to me because the older I get, the less I can explain how I have gotten where I am. I feel half the time I just fall into things and God cares so dearly that He infuses it all with Grace and Love.
When I look at me, I feel as though the verse about how God uses the Foolish Things, the Nobody’s and the Underdogs, to gain Him glory was not written to just anybody. It feels like a line written to keep me churning my legs. To help me not throw down the weight of all my responsibility and yell, “Oh to hell with all this!” Which, in reality, is an accurate description of where it all those feelings really belong…because it seems the moments when the clouds are darkest are always when Satan is trying to block out the most light. That if he let me see just past the horizon, I would know that not only is God for me, He likes me too.
That kind of stuff freaks me out a little.
A good friend of mine said to me when this whole odd business of me, God and digitally written therapy first started that he knew God was waking something up inside of me.
I have thought about that so many times. You just do when someone tells you the truth and it hits you in that slightly unnerving way that real truth does.
And yet, so often I lose God’s plot. Not even in large ways, but that subtle sidetracking of missing the point that gifts are not one-time things. We were never made for a flash and then to dissipate for the next 40 years.
God puts a fire in us to spark something bigger.
Just as a simple match and tinder start pile of logs, our spirits, with the match of God’s goodness, are made to start things bigger than we could have ever seen before. We are put here to “to do the good works which God provided in advance for us to do.” Even when we cannot see it. Even when the answer is still beyond the horizon. We must fall on calloused knees and plead again each day for God to move in us.
God move and start with me…
God…light…me…
Chasing The Wild Beast 