This week I found a quote that I liked “Sometimes we have to surrender our own picture of what we are to be to accept the joy and fulfillment of what God himself ordained us to be”
I am in that process at this period of my life. As a child so many ideas of what I was to be, rules of what I had to be, and hopes of the grandeur of what I could possible be filled my life, my plan books, and my goals…..yet in this year, when so many things in my life are indeed different from the imagined life I had planned for, I find that God indeed has other plans for me. Some days I think perhaps if I hadn’t messed up this or that, or somehow that perhaps I clipped God’s plan for me, for after all, could he have really meant for this or that to happen?
God is God.
There is not a thing in my life that God didn’t know would happen long before it happened. Like watching my own teenager hit a bump on the road of life this week at much too fast a speed, I suspect God cringes when I too, think I am more capable than I am, self servingly believing I am enough without guidance until I too, suffer the jolts of hitting that bump at too fast a speed in my own life.
The Bible talks about not over yeasting or rising above our elevation, that it leads to disaster. Humbling isn’t it? Our very humanness makes us want to always add more leavening to our dough, to rise fully and large, yet our creator is so much larger, and much more able to be Creator than ourselves.
My hope this Christmas is that in the doing of the most unpretentious tasks for those I love and for those I wish to show love, that somehow in removing the ego stroking, public acknowledgement seeking activities and focusing on the very noticing of those around me’s needs and heart longings, that I will remember that God sent his son to fulfill our very need to be close to him through forgiveness and mercy, not to make a show of who he is…..for even as God, he didn’t choose to say “it is done” and take our sins, he paid a dear price in allowing his son to be taken in a painful, wrenching way, and as a father chose us over his own comfort of saying “fixed”…..
may we all choose Christmas this year, doing the work of our father and loving those around us through words, acts of service and sharing.
God is good.
