“Spending too much time on the details rather than the dreams. This is a natural corollary to the mistake of staying busy. When life gets busy and I get invested in all the dirty details flowing my way, I lose site of the dreams that God has for me. Here’s the reality: those dreams usually come when the pace of my life slows enough to do stuff like read, pray, rest, experience new places, and meet new people. Dealing with the dailiness of life doesn’t allow for that. It needs to be planned and prioritized. We need to create space to experience God and all that he has for us.” ~Tony Morgan and Andy Stanley, Killing Cockroaches, 186.
Sometimes I feel like I am not sure exactly where I am going in life. When I try to really figure out where God is leading me I tend to get all disoriented, and in the end, I just throw my hands up in the air like there is no hope in getting anywhere with this puzzle. Trying to figure things seems to just make my brain hurt and I walk away discouraged every time. I think this desire to have the life plan in front of me is a response to anxiety of not knowing what’s next. It is like I get fixated on trying to get the inside scoop on what’s coming and in order to be able to know the best choices to make.
I guess I just want to know what God’s dream is for me. I want to know where he is leading me. I want the answers so that I can see what is around the next corner. But this type of desire really emerges from a lack of trust in him. It is not that I do not want to trust God. I simply want the information, the understanding, the “game plan.” I want to kill the uncertainty and uneasy feelings that anxiety about the unknown brings. Life seems like it would be so much easier if I was informed ahead of time on a lot of things that I question and want to know about. But, of course, how much would we really need to trust someone if we already knew where they were taking us. It sort of defeats the purpose of trust. And so I have learned to try and take it easy when thinking about what dream God has for me. It has forced me to lean into trusting him more and being ok having the knowledge at the time I need it, and not necessarily three months ahead of time.
Trusting God is like getting on a tour bus where you are not sure exactly where it is going to take you, but you know that you will get to see the city. On the tour, you are supposed to just sit back and watch the sites that the tour guide decides to point out as you ride down the streets. Each destination is announced as you pass by, not beforehand. As believers, we want God to “show us the city,” so to say, but we often want him to give us the tour route and the stops ahead of time so that we can know what is coming and be prepared for it. We want to know where we will be going and for how long. We want the big picture! It’s as if we want God to inform us of the route and the stops along the way so that we can determine if we think they are good places to go, as though we then would intend to argue about them if we don’t agree with the route.
We live in an age with a culture saturated with the ideology of self-entitlement and immediate gratification. Part of what I have been realizing is how we all want to know more and be the driver in our life so that things will go our way and we can get what we want and do the things we want to do. But God is inviting us to trust him and trust his dream for our life and the desires he has for us and all the things he is prepared to show us on the tour. We often don’t recognize how self-centered and self-reliant our thinking is at times. Why would God indulge our desire to know the entire route if that would ultimately lead us to decrease our need to trust him? The more we know ahead of time and are able to see things coming, the more we will tend to cut God out of the picture of our lives and carry on by ourselves. I mean, if we know the plan, then what’s God’s role anyway? Why surrender?
Maybe what we need to do is realize how dependent we actually are on God. Dependence on God is something we like to throw around and say a lot, but it is something I think we are all under-developed in recognizing and appropriating in our lives. If we truly understood exactly how much we depended on God, we would not be so quick to want to take the tour route out of his hands and start driving the bus ourselves. We would not want to substitute his dream for our life with our own. We must get to the point where we are comfortable with the unknown and simply appreciate living in the moment and leaning on God’s wisdom and goodness to lead us to green pastures. But this takes being willing to forgo the luxury afforded by having one hand on the steering wheel in order to self-navigate their own tour of life. Trusting in the dream God has for us requires us to be willing to enter the forest without first knowing which path to take. It requires us to be willing to set sail without first charting a course upon the ocean. It requires us to be willing to walk on the water.
Only seeing the first step to take at the current point in our lives and not the second or third can be very scary because we feel like we might not be heading in the right direction since we cannot see where it is ultimately leading. This can be downright unnerving and affect us negatively to the very core of our being. It might be tempting to want to live a more predictable, complacent, “under-our-control” sort of life and not want to leave these type of safe feelings for the more risky, uncertain, sometimes unexplainable life of adventure with God. Because let’s face it, trusting in God’s dream for our lives and going where he leads us requires that we sit back and trust the Driver. It requires us to be OK not knowing if we will miss part of the city that someone told us was the “best” part. It requires us to not know the destination before we start the journey. It requires us to say “yes” to a path that we might not be sure if we can follow. But if we adopt God’s dream as our dream (even if we probably don’t know what that dream is and maybe never fully will), we can know that our lives are going in the best direction possible and that we will get to see the city through God’s eyes. Can there be any better way to live life than the way he sees things? I doubt that any dream we can come up with could top the dream God has for us. Let’s trust his dream one step at a time. ~JW
~JW
Am I missing something or is this just a “written” blog? Not finding a place to “listen” to this?