My day started with a quick trip to Pinterest (a website with pictures of all kinds of great things that give you web page links; anything from sewing tips, to how to build a chicken coop, to amazing recipes). I seem to get derailed for hours day dreaming if you will or at the very least putting my current life on hold so that I can fantasize about my pretend one. This day I found myself fantasizing about having my own land and homesteading on it. I was reading up on bee keeping and how to raise goats. I quickly went into plan mode and had the rest of my life planned out… the problem was that God was silent.
We all have desires, plans, and things that give us deep purpose. Trying to sort all of that out with God’s will sometimes seems so very challenging and often I find myself derailing a very great path that God had me on to pursue a passion or desire that I want. And I find that almost every time I try to take my own happiness into my own hands without waiting on God to take me there. I end up feeling alone in my endeavor, wondering where God went, when it was me that strayed of course. One of my desires has always been to Homestead. A little Dairy farm with a garden and cute cuddly animals every spring. Part of what makes this picture difficult is that I also have desires to travel, be care free and flexible to whatever adventure God may have in store. I crave the missionary life and creating a settlement of any sort for long periods of time can create a restless stirring in me. So I wrestle back and forth with wanting to put my roots down and wanting to dig them up! I think the real struggle is whether or not I will choose to trust where God has me or make my own way.
Sometimes you don’t even recognize that you are out of his will until the silence on the other end is deafening and you get to that point where you would rather hear God yell at you than not say anything at all. And it’s so easy to slip right into living for yourself. It’s our natural instinct to follow the easiest path, the path that makes us happy, or to abandon a path that isn’t making us happy or is too difficult. But what we are really talking about is trust and faith. Those pillars of faith in the Bible all had one thing in common; they chose to trust in God. Even when they had moments of doubt or experiences with disobedience, they ran back to the Father as soon as they realized that his path, no matter how unfamiliar, was the better path. Two verses that come to mind for me are:
Jeremiah 29:11
For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
And
Proverbs 3:5,6
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
and he will make your paths straight.
First in Jeremiah we see that God is reaching out to man and asking him to trust him, because he is a good God with good plans and what a remarkable life it will be if we choose to be blessed by him rather than pursue our own blessing. Then in Proverbs we see the wisest earthy king speak about trusting God with everything, not trying to make sense of it or analyze it so that we can control it but to really submit and let him straighten it all out.
But the real key to that verse is that word submit… That word we so often dislike, there is a reason we dislike it: We are selfish. In order to submit we must place more importance on another than on ourselves. We recognize this negative connotation even before we find out what we are being asked to submit to. Our whole life we are inclined to think in selfish terms, we make it all about us. Our life, our plans, our marriage, our children, our free time, our sanity, our vacations, our house, our money. Do I need to go on? When did it become ours?
Psalms 24:1
The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it,
the world, and all who live in it.
A lot of our unhappiness in this life is due to our inability to recognize our purpose. We have god complexes; we think that God is here to please us and in fact we were created to bring him praise and glory and honor. When God sent Jesus to this earth, he modeled a life of sacrifice and obedience (servanthood) to God but he also experienced a closeness with God, the miraculous power of God and the development of relationships with people that no other person ever had. He gave everything for us out of an obedience that can only be explained by a love that I still have yet to grasp in all my understanding. Maybe that is why the writer of Proverbs says not to lean on our own understanding!
If all we have already belongs to Him than why are we not asking him what we should be doing with it? How would you feel if you left your children home for the night with a babysitter that was cruel to your children? This sitter said unkind things to them, refused to get them something to eat until the commercial of a favorite show on TV, talked on the phone all night instead of engaging with them, punished them out of anger, thought resentful things towards them because this person felt trapped by having to watch your kids. Would you ever hire them again? And yet those children that we love so much and would save from that experience are not our children at all. If they belong to God, (and they do) we ought to be treating that responsibility much differently than we do. God gave them unto our care and we are to treat them as His children and not your own.
How would you feel if you went to the bank to get your money out and the cashier said, “Well it’s not here because I felt like going on vacation, so I spent your money, I mean I work so hard at watching it for you, so I spent it.”? We would probably invest our money somewhere else with someone who cared. But we are just like that teller, God has given us everything and we spend that money so very selfishly without even blinking an eye to how God would have us manage it and we even have trouble giving God a symbolist 10% tithe as a sign that we recognize that all things come from him. And if that wasn’t enough we get mad at God for investing in others and not us, we question who he blesses and ask why we don’t have the same blessings in our life.
These words are not meant to condemn but I hope they convict, I hope that they stir within us the very idea that our happiness is in relation to how open we are to letting God be everything to us. We are like the man in the Bible who wanted to enter the kingdom of heaven and he asked Christ what he had to do. Christ started off soft with telling him to obey God, the man was excited to report that he had been doing just that and when the man pressed in further and said what else, Christ went to the heart of the issue, the heart of this man’s idol, the heart of his selfish behavior. Christ told him to sell everything and follow Him. The man walked away sad for he was a very wealthy man.
We are this man in one area of life or another. When we press into Christ to seek out the why to our question of an unfulfilled or unhappy life we often don’t like the answer. Does God hate that mans wealth? No He was just telling him that it would never be enough and that if he wanted true happiness he would need to deny himself and take up his cross, he would have to start asking whose wealth it was to begin with, he would have to start making a choice to include God in everything, not just the small percent that came easy.
For me it isn’t money or even my kids so much, not really my marriage, or my health, why? Because in all of those things I find myself helpless and in a constant state of crying out to God to take over for me. My big area of control and selfishness is in my purpose, it is in my plans and it is in my secret desires, those day dreams of a perfect world. I feel as though God promised me things that have not come to pass. I could hold onto my plans and take myself down a hundred different roads all by myself or I can trust him. I can choose to stop planning and start praying. I can as the scriptures say, lift my eyes to the things above and not on earthly things. And then that path, will unfold by God’s perfect design.
My false god, is me. It is my clinging to my selfish plans. And my constant nagging at God and trying to manipulate his perfect hand in my life. How does a person lay down such a personal false god? I am literally having to chose to lay myself on that alter, and trust that what God raises from those ashes is better than the death I am living and trying to pass off as His life. It hurts, yes devastates our pride to come into this kind of surrender to God but our pride is thing getting in the way of his joy, and his peace and his great love.
Later that night at church I felt God speak to me about the desires I have to Homestead. I was in worship and he gave me the picture of the lion laying down with the lamb. I keep trying to make my Homestead on this earth and the truth is that just like lamentations speaks about the futility of this world, that would be meaningless compared to the homestead I have in heaven. This world is not my home and keep trying to make it permanent. I keep trying to build my house on the sandy land and not on the rock. The truth is that so much of what I am building will not last. God wants me to invest my time and my energy into a heritage that will last, seeds that are eternal, a harvest that is not seen by our physical eyes. He gave me the lion and the lamb to show me that my desires are not foolish, they are just misplaced and that one day I will have my homestead but it will be in an everlasting and beautiful place that can not be taken away from me.
If we are to find a purpose that is to give us meaning and fulfillment we must stop investing in the things that are not eternal. God gave me several things that I am to invest in, it is a small list but it has a great deal of importance to me because no matter how side tracked I get by this world I can always go back to these things. I am to invest in 1. HIM. I am to invest in my God. With worship, with reading the word, with finding and using my spiritual giftings. I am to invest in 2. Others. I am to love others in a way that bring them closer to my loving savior so that they too can know the amazing love that he has for them. My Children and husband, my friends and family, my church and my leaders, and then those that God brings into my life however he chooses.
These two things are eternal. These two things matter. These are the things that my heart will choose with all intensity to focus on. Because there is no point in wasting time. There is only this moment and in this moment I choose to lay down my plans and hope for the eternal!
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