Thankfully, God’s plans also happen to be much better than my own.
The number of days or weeks we are together isn’t important; what really matters is the way God knits our hearts together during the time He chooses for us to be in one another’s lives.
I would like to say that I had all kinds of great ideas about what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. I would like to say my ministry was born out of a carefully thought-out plan. These things simply aren’t true, though. I was walking through life one moment at a time, blown away by what God could do through me if I simply said yes.
When we cannot find joy in our circumstances, we can find joy in God who is unchanged and unchanging. We can rejoice, not in what is going on around or within us, but because God is our strength and He will continue to be.
And the more I knew my feebleness, my flaws, and my shortcomings, the more I knew His gentleness toward me, His tender glance, His strong and loving shoulder that was always available to lean on.
Sometimes the things we would never pick for our lives gives us opportunities to receive God’s provision, to see Him working in ways we otherwise might not experience.
Slowly, I was beginning to understand that it wasn’t my productivity that God desired; it was my heart. It wasn’t my ministry God loved; it was me. God was glorified, is glorified, when we give Him our hearts, give Him ourselves, and faithfully do the thing right in front of us, no matter how small or trivial.
As time passes, I realize more and more how conditioned I have been to be ashamed of my weakness. Somehow it is okay to attend to the brokenness in the lives of others, but to admit to brokenness in our own homes, even in our own hearts? We have been told that this is downright embarrassing. What we know to be true, though, as we dig into Scripture, is that God is not ashamed of our weakness. He is not ashamed of it, because He can use even this to glorify Himself.
This is the sin of the Israelites, of all humankind really, this slowness to remember all that He has done as we stare intently at what He hasn’t done yet, what He might not do.
I think of the privilege it is to be able to speak life over these hurting people and believe in new life for them as we strive to love them the way we’ve been loved by Christ, the privilege it is to watch His faithfulness unfold in their stories.
The angel had said to Mary, “Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord would fulfill his promises to her!” And this blessing isn’t always what we think- the happy ending we wanted and the desires of our hearts fulfilled.
It is a brave thing to hope, to continue in hope, knowing that God might say yes but that He could say no, and choosing to praise Him anyway.
Hope is a crazy thing, a courageous thing. Faith is a bold, irrational choice.
He may move you somewhere across the world. Or he may move you to believe again, to dare again, to reach out again. But if the steadying love of Christ moves you, it will move you out into the world with the bravest hope. He will move you to hope for what seem like impossible things, because His closeness is your most cherished thing.
God, who did not spare His own Son, will provide what we need, when we need it, even when we do not know what we need or that we need.
At the end of time, all that will count is that we lived the Gospel with our very lives, that we paid attention to the people God gave us and dwelt knowledgeably and hospitably in the place to which He called us.
You are doing something great with your life – when you are doing all the small things with His great love. You are changing the world – when you are changing one person’s world. You aren’t missing your best life – when you aren’t missing opportunities to love like Christ.
I think that as humans, each of us just as lacking as the next, the most powerful thing we can do for another person is not to try to fix his or her pain or make it go away but to acknowledge it.
As I’m tempted to wallow in guilt over all that I am not for my children, gently He points out that I was never meant to meet all their needs anyway. It isn’t me who can make up for all their losses and hurts. He reminds me that I cannot be what they need Him to be: Savior.
Our hope is our offering to Him, our sacrifice. And in our hope, He is shaping us, molding us, drawing us to Him. We will now Him here, friend.
Why had I believed my whole life that ease and success, gifts and miracles, smiling faces and my plans fulfilled, meant the Lord’s blessing and favor? The blessings also abound in the darkest night and the deepest valley, if we have eyes to see them. The invitation to experience sorrow and doubt and all those long nights with Him – that is favor.