You see, I have grown up amid a culture that preached to me continually the importance of having a plan. When I was in high school, I was told I needed to set goals for myself, both short-term and long-term. I needed to have clear aims to focus on, self-imposed "deadlines," so-to-speak. Because, if you don't have a plan and don't know where you're going, you're obviously not going to get anywhere or do anything worthwhile with your life...right?
I struggled with this because at that time I honestly didn't know what my future was going to look like. There were a lot of things I could see myself doing as a job, but when it came to choosing what to pursue, I felt completely at a loss. Adults in my life told me it was okay to not have a clear picture just yet, as I still had several more years to figure it out before going to college and picking a major, etc.
But then something incredible happened. Just as I was starting to formulate my short-term goals for what would happen once I graduated college, God intervened. He started to nudge me down a different path than anything I had ever considered. As I walked a little hesitantly down this new path that started with putting college off for a year to attend Ellerslie, I tasted for the first time the sheer bliss of having only a general sense of what God was about to do in my life. I knew He had been clear that this was where and how I was supposed to spend the next few months (actually, at the time I thought I would be there for a full year), but as for what it would look like, I had no clue nor any way to predict it. Ellerslie was just starting up the summer I went there; there was no predicting just what was going to happen with students from all over coming to this tiny town in Colorado with the goal of pursuing Christ together.
Since that summer, it seems every major step I've taken--and even the smaller steps, too--have followed a very similar pattern of knowing where God was leading me but not having any kind of a clear or easily-articulated picture of what it was going to look like. And over and over again, I've seen God work in amazing ways, doing more than I ever could have imagined. His thoughts aren't like ours; He sees the big picture, as well as every tiny and minute detail that goes into it. Consequently, His ways are different than ours--they're higher; they're better (Isaiah 55:8). And they tend to look crazy or even a little more than crazy in the eyes of the world, because they don't follow the same line of thinking as our limited point of view. His plans often cause us to take risks--risks that don't make sense, even to us at times. But they always cause us to rely on Him more and in ways that we wouldn't otherwise.
And that is why I get excited when I hear someone talking about starting something new or doing things differently, and those words, "I don't know what it's going to look like exactly," come out of that person's mouth: because in those words I recognize a sense of willingness to let God take the lead and orchestrate the steps in carrying out whatever dream or desire or "goal" the person may be talking about. It's in those times where where we don't know exactly what will happen next or what something is about to look like--what an idea will look like when it's actually being lived out--that our faith grows and our hearts begin to taste the deep joy of allowing God to have all there is of us.
"The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps." -Proverbs 16:9
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