Our minds are so very limited.

I say that I’m learning to love change and rejoice at it’s arrival.  But my mind is just so small.  My imagination so very…limited.  I say change and I easily go to job, family, schedule, finances.  I can look at those big issues and say, “Yeah, like the seasons, Lord, have me to welcome this new dawning in my life.”  But then I’m shell shocked when God discloses that He might desire that I hear from Him differently.  I resist when He says, “That method worked yesterday, but it’s not going to do for today.”

I heard from Him at the patio table yesterday at noon.  I’m back.  Why don’t I hear today?

As a teacher, this can be a bit frustrating.  One series He gives me the whole game plan long before the first lesson begins.  Another series He tells me only so much as I need to know today.  Some ideas come, literally, months in advance.  Some build over the course of years.  And some He gave me last night.

I refuse to teach without Him.  I won’t make something up and let carnal knowledge be enough.  I insist on a Word.  And sometimes He doesn’t feel like speaking until the 11th hour.

Once I held firm on this so ardently that I basically blessed Him out and went to bed the night before I was to teach a lesson that I had not yet been given.  I don’t dream.  I did that night.  He wrote the whole thing on an old green chalk board.  I don’t wake up without a (very!) loud alarm either.  I did that day.  The dream ended, I awoke alert and ready, I ran to my computer and recreated what I’d seen. It was a great lesson.

He may make you wait, but it will always be worth it.

How God related to me last month may well be wholly different from the way He desires to relate to me today.  I seem to be ok with the new ways, but letting go of the old ones doesn’t sit so well.

I hate to be cliched, but when He closes a window He usually opens a door.  So often I sit and put my face in my hands and moan over the closing of the window and totally miss that door swinging wide.

This could be about embracing changes in your life that you didn’t initiate.  This could be about finding peace in the fact that life and family are ever moving into new seasons, some of which don’t involve much of you.  For me, this is about being willing to let the Lord have His way.  It’s about vigilantly watching the horizons of my life for the dawning of His appearing in new ways, with new challenges, instituting new norms.  It’s about not getting chagrin when the old methods show themselves now fruitless.  It’s about seeing the trials and disappointments, challenges and changes as segways into a new chapter with an incredibly creative Maker, Father, and Friend.

Look to the Old Testament prophets.  Just think about all the ways that God revealed Himself to them, and all the ways He had them reveal His Word to others.  There were visions, there were dreams, there were voices.  They stood outside of temples, they requested audiences with kings.  They humiliated themselves in public.  They bought trinkets design to invoke thoughts and mental connections.  They married prostitutes.  They walked about in sackcloth and ashes.  They wrote and they spoke and they cried and they pleaded and they loved and they did whatever He said to do.  And what He said was crazy creative.

I wonder if Hosea ever said, “Can’t I just go buy a jug and smash it like the last guy? (Jeremiah 19:1-15) Do I really have to go and buy her back?  My heart is dying here!  Can’t you let me do what he did instead?” (Hosea 3:1-5)

The answer then and now is no.  You and God are unique.  You and God today are unique. There is no other pairing and no other time like it.  The Lord has amazing things for me this year.  The amazing things He has for you won’t look like mine. There is no pattern, there is no road map.

There is only trust.

Let me, Lord, not look to anyone else, including the me of old, in order to find your hand at work today.  Let me not look at yesterday’s news for today’s living. Enable me– only by the unfathomable power of your Holy Spirit is it possible!– to follow the work of your hand in my life even when it comes from and takes me somewhere wholly new.  May my roots run deep into the only sustainable surface that endures, You.