I reflected on the plans I had as I finished college many years ago… Yes, I’ve worked hard to take advantage of opportunities. But the fact that the opportunities arrived at all had mostly little to do with me.
If we want to make God laugh, the old axiom goes, tell Him your plans. Our lives never follow the scripts we write for our future. We might as well leave room for God to surprise us, because He’s going to do it anyway.
We must leave room for God to surprise us! We plan and figure and predict that this or that will happen, but we forget to make room for God to come in as He chooses. On any number of life-changing events—I call them “spiritual markers”—I have been surprised how God came into our lives in ways we had never expected Him to come. And we could never have planned it the way it worked out!!! The way God gave our church family, The Journey, a church when we had none was just one of those spiritual markers… I call it a miracle!!!
Seeing these spiritual markers (and I have more than 200 documented) in my life has taught me that I shouldn’t look for God to come in a particular way, but I should look for Him. I think about Peter coming to his disciples when they were praying for him in prison. The way to make room for God is to expect Him to come—but not to come in a certain way. I try to remember that He may break in at any minute.
We tend to forget the element of surprise, yet God never works in any other way. It is human for us to be disappointed when we don’t get what we want. But when we dwell on our disappointment, as if we should have gotten what we wanted, then we forget to trust that God may have something different in store for us. Many of us pray, “Thy will be done,” but more often than not, when we don’t get what we want, we forget it may be God’s will that we not get it!
We can only know the present moment… NOW. This is our life—all of it. When we worry about future wants and past disappointments, we don’t leave room in ourselves for the present. When we let God take care of the future and live the best we can right NOW, we can feel assured we’ll be ready for the better things that are in store for us.
Let’s keep our lives so constantly in touch with God that His surprising power can break through at any moment. In other words, let’s live in a constant state of expectancy, and leave room for God to come in as He decides. Today let’s trust in God’s will and leave room for Him to surprise us!
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