Probably because we don’t always agree on things. I can get confused when I pray and try to trade places with Him, because I really like running the show myself.
God’s plans are perfect, but they’re not easy. They are for our formation and His glory, but I want them to be for my comfort and convenience. Why can’t He just get with the Laura plan?
We have gratification goals. God has galaxy goals.
We see now. God sees eternity.
There’s a verse I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.
The mother of James and John asked Jesus if her sons might be able to sit at His right and left side in His kingdom. I picture it kind of like me running into Bill Gates in the grocery store (although I’m sure Bill doesn’t do his own shopping) and asking him to make my daughters CEO’s of two of his companies.
Jesus’ response?
“You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said to them.
Matthew 20:22
I’m guessing Jesus wants to say that to me a lot.
In another place, Jesus rebukes Peter who’s arguing with him about the cross.
“You are seeing things merely from a human point of view, not from God’s.”
mark 8:33
I can imagine Jesus saying that to me too!
The most helpful picture I have of how prayer works is that of me in a small boat on a lake. The boat is tethered by a long rope to a huge redwood tree on the shore. My job isn’t to pull the redwood to me, but to pull me in my boat to the redwood.
The goal of prayer isn’t to make God adjust to my will, but to humbly align myself with His will.
“Faith means trusting that if I knew what God knows and loved like God loves, I’d do what God does.“
john ortberg
I marvel at people who are so sure of God’s will that they pray boldly, like a boss. I’m not that confident, which is good motivation to get to know Him better.
A friend of mine shares the story of two little girls who were playing by a pond. Denise fell in and Maria managed to grab her friend’s long hair and hold her head above the water until help came.
The press picked up the story and interviewed the hero, Maria, asking how the event had changed her life. She answered: “Denise won’t play with me anymore; she says I pulled her hair!”
Sometimes it feels like God is pulling our hair when He’s saving our lives.
Lord, You know what we don’t know. You see what we don’t see. You are good. Help us to pray according to Your will, and trust you even when we don’t understand.
First, can we just agree that everyone except God is out of sync right now?
That includes me, and any kind of schedule for blog posting. I swing from thinking I’ll never post again because more words in your in-box may increase your feelings of stress, to feeling like we all may need to be reminded we’re not alone. Anyway, sorry for the inconsistency.
Decisions are hard in the best of times, but during a pandemic when conditions change day to day? Brutal!
Over and over we hear the word, “pivot” and we seek to re-imagine God-honoring choices in this time.
What’s one challenging situation you are facing that’s been made more complicated by the pandemic?
I’m grappling along with everyone else, but here are 3 of my go-to principles:
1. Ask for wisdom.
Sometimes there is a clear, moral right and wrong answer, but often God’s will isn’t some ONE hidden secret and if you get it wrong it will be like a disaster scene out of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.
James 1:5
Sometimes you just need to ask, “What would be the most pleasing choice to you, Lord?” and decide. I love what Luke writes when the apostles were making hard decisions for the young Jesus-following community:
It seemedgood to the Holy Spirit and to us…
Acts 15:28
God didn’t speak through a megaphone, but the apostles prayed and listened and made the choice that seemed good. Nothing may feel totally clear to you, but you may need to prayerfully choose what seems like the best, God-honoring choice.
2. Seek unity.
Let’s defer to the people who feel most vulnerable. More than ever we need to extend grace and not be offended by others regarding Covid choices about jobs, education, parenting, travel, celebrations… The people around you (even family) have challenges you may not be aware of. We’re all doing our best.
If you are married, God won’t lead one of you to one conclusion and your spouse to another. Pray and listen until you are united – both on the same page.
Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.
Ephesians 4:2-3
3. Persevere. Just because it’s God’s will doesn’t mean it will be easy. (I know…Not exactly what you wanted to hear, right?)
You may feel like the Israelites wandering in the wilderness in this season. But God grows His people most dramatically in the wilderness because we are forced to face our inadequacies and lean on Him.
Could it be that God is actually more concerned with our character than our comfort?
Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.
James 1:2-4
Which of these is the hardest for you? Which is the most helpful?
The sky is striped pink and peach, reflecting in the perfectly still lake as I write this. It’s early morning and quiet.
The peaceful landscape before me is at odds with how the past few months have felt as we transition from one season to another – both literally and metaphorically.
Instead of stillness, settled and calm, our life has felt like an autumn wind-storm that blows colored leaves off the trees and continues to swirl them around like question marks and possibilities that won’t land.
I want them to settle so I can rake them into neat manageable piles, but God has other plans.
In this season, I notice two of the spiritual disciplines that are most difficult for me – waiting, and trusting that God is at work for His glory and my good even when I can’t see it. Can anyone else relate?
There are no neat and tidy piles that I can control. Instead, we pray with open hands and try not to grasp.
In this season my prayer has been, “Help me to be present and grateful just for this day before me and trust You to hold the future.”
As I pray and wait, I’ve been reminded over and over of God’s words to Daniel:
“Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding. As soon as you began to pray, a word went out, which I have come to tell you…”
“Do not be afraid, Daniel. Since the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard, and I have come in response to them.But the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me twenty-one days.
daniel 9:23, 10:12-13
In these verses I am assured that God is at work even when I don’t see it, and I’m reminded that there is a spiritual battle going on too! There is nothing Satan would like more than to discourage us or cause us to doubt God’s faithfulness.
Don’t lose heart! Look at Isaiah 65:24!
Before they call I will answer; while they are still speaking I will hear.
isaiah 65:24
Over the past couple weeks God brought to us an invitation we never expected in a million years. We’ve been asked to take a short-term interim pastorate at the International Church of Lucerne, Switzerland.
As we have prayed and talked with them, this is the verse that keeps coming to mind:
It seemed goodto the Holy Spirit and to us…
Acts 15:28
It’s not neat and tidy and there are lots of consequences as we try to rearrange our life to accept this call and go as a team. But the combination of our gifts, their need, and the timing, seem to be coming together in something that may be pleasing to God. We think it will only be 2-4 months, but it has made even the plans we thought we had, tentative.
I share all this in the hopes that it will encourage others who are in seasons of question marks. You’re not alone!
If you have lived abroad for any amount of time, I’d love to hear your advice as we embark on this adventure! Leave your thoughts in the comments!
As always, I’d love to have you join me over on Instagram.
A week ago my small group was sitting around our harvest table finishing off yummy enchiladas when one of my young mom friends with toddlers shared about a difficult decision she and her husband made which she was still anguishing over.
This couple prayed and prayed, seeking wisdom from the Lord about whether to spend their limited budget on some extra child care that would free up a little time for them to nurture their marriage in a very stressful season of travel for her husband, or use the funds to send one of their kids to a private school that they think might provide a particularly nurturing environment.
They were faithful in prayer and sought information and guidance that might inform their decision. They are committed to God’s Word and want to honor Him. They made a decision, but keep wondering what the consequences might be.
Have you ever wondered if you might have heard God wrong?
Over thirty years ago, John and I were serving at a church in the suburbs of Chicago. We were open to moving and received a call from a church in Washington D.C. As we prayed about whether to accept this position, John reminded me this wasn’t a shell game with God. It wasn’t like there was necessarily just one right answer. Our job was to trust God and try to discern what we thought would be most pleasing to Him.
After much prayer we decided this move would be honoring to God and we ended up moving to D.C. Here’s what happened:
I went 8 months pregnant with our second child, her sister just 19 months old
D.C. had the highest cost of living in the nation at the time and we had no money.
We moved away from all our family for the first time and knew no one.
Our church was a cathedral type church, drawing from a large area so we didn’t see the people we worshipped with during the week – hard to build community.
The area we lived in had no moms who had made the choice to stay at home with their kids so I went to the park every day and would basically say to any stranger, “Will you be my friend?”
John went to a transition seminar that was required when he started the job. He came home and said, “I have good news and bad news. The good news is, we won! We had more stress points than anyone else! The bad news is, they said we should be in counseling.”
The bottom line was that our years in D.C. were maybe the hardest of our marriage. We kept saying, “Lord, did we get this wrong? How could this be Your will and feel like such a bad fit? Why is this so hard?”
We’ll never know this side of heaven whether pride or impatience or something else clouded our discernment of God’s will, or if we were exactly where He wanted us. But as we have reflected on this season, here are some things we’ve observed:
Just because circumstances are hard doesn’t mean you’re outside God’s will. Although we prayed fervently, things never got easier during the time we lived in D.C., but God was still faithful. We learned to be grateful that He was our shelter, our rock, unchanging. “Great is Thy Faithfulness” became our anthem. “Strength for today and bright hope for tomorrow, Blessings all mine and ten thousand beside!”
None of this fazes us because Jesus loves us. I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.
Romans 8:37-39 msg
2. Sometimes God wants to do a work in you instead of for you. As we look back, we see many ways God was preparing us for things to come. We experienced deeper intimacy with Him and greater dependence on Him. God knit our family together in love with Him and each other because that’s all we had.
So we’re not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without his unfolding grace. These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for us. There’s far more here than meets the eye. The things we see now are here today, gone tomorrow. But the things we can’t see now will last forever.
2 corinthians 4:16-18 Msg
3. We may mess up. We may get it wrong, but God promises to redeem as we turn to Him. We came away from our time in D.C. with more humility and awareness of our fallibility than if we had gone from “strength to strength.”
…we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.
romans 8:28 msg
What’s been your experience with discerning God’s will? As always, I’d love to hear from you! If you get this in email, just click on the title and it will take you to the site where you can post a comment. If it’s your first time, don’t worry if it doesn’t show up right away! And if you’re interested in some smaller doses of inspiration, join me over on Instagram. (You can turn on “notifications” in the upper right-hand corner if you want to know when there is a post.)
It seems like infertility comes up in at least half of the conversations I’m a part.
Or, someone mourns the death of a dream – what feels like unanswered prayer.
I’ve never dealt with infertility personally. I can’t begin to understand the depth of pain, confusion, and frustration that couples experience. But I do know what the death of a dream feels like. I can recognize the expressions of weariness, longing, and “what’s wrong with me that God doesn’t answer this prayer that I feel like is coming from a pure place?”
I have godly, faithful friends who have prayerfully entered into IVF or adoption. They have dreams, but open hands, desiring to be responsive to God’s leading. They do their part. They are responsible. They read and ask questions and look at finances and trust God. They pray for guidance and clear direction and step forward in faith.
And then, and then…. There’s no pregnancy, or no adoption match, or the adopted child endangers the rest of the family and has to be released to a different home.
And my friends are left asking, “Whaaat? God we trusted You!!! We thought we were following your leading!!!! Where did we go wrong? A + B is supposed to = C! What is wrong with OUR MATH? Don’t you love us? Aren’t you a good God? We thought you were!”
It saddens me when I see people grieving and at the same time, beating themselves up for “Reading God wrong.”
As followers of Jesus we really want to be honest about the desires of our hearts. We also really want God’s direction and want to submit to His will that may look different than ours.
Two weeks ago my best friend from college called on a Sunday afternoon to tell me she has been diagnosed with ALS.
Yes, that ALS – the horrific Lou Gehrig’s disease that eats away at your muscles til you are a rag doll of your former self.
Arms and legs progressively stop functioning . It also impacts your voice and breathing; lifespan shortens as complications related to lung function intrude.
I simply could. not. deal. I couldn’t accept that my vibrant full-of-LIFE friend with the most infectious laugh on earth might have to experience this crippling horror.
Instead of leaning in, I wanted to lean out. Instead of turning towards, I wanted to turn away. Continue reading
For 6 months I got used to waking in the middle of the night, prompted to pray for my brother, who was fighting cancer. I prayed with many others for healing. I prayed specifically, passionately and with complete faith in God’s power.
You’ve had a similar experience? Yeah, I thought so.
These days I can get downright snippy with God. Now I wake in the night, or my mind turns to Him through the day and I sometimes think, “Why bother? Why talk to God about the lesser things when He did not seem to care enough to fix this great big thing?”
Of course I know some of the “right” theological answers to this question.
Yes, David was ultimately healed and is alive and whole and free of pain with Jesus.
Yes, we live in a broken world and illness and death are a consequence of the fall…God is sovereign…Our minds are too small to grasp His grander plans…He will cause ALL things to work together for good to those who love Him…He is more concerned about our character than our comfort… Blah blah blah…
.
Sometimes when you FEEL in the “depths of despair” as Anne of Green Gables would say, you don’t care about the words.
But I keep praying. I keep talking to God and I’ll tell you why.
I keep praying for the same reason a child keeps talking to her parents after she hasn’t gotten her way.
There’s something deep inside me that still knows that God loves me and I am drawn to Him.
There is something in me that knows there is something bigger going on.
Prayer doesn’t “work” in the way we’d like it to. It doesn’t “work” as in we pray to get what we want. We pray to get what God wants.
I think we make the mistake of seeing prayer as transactional, when it’s primarily relational.
I still don’t know what to do with those verses that exhort us to ask and receive, be the widow badgering the judge, have faith to move mountains, but I can get on-board with this thought from Tim Keller.
We can be sure our prayers are answered precisely in the way we would want them to be answered if we knew everything God knows. Tim Keller
Prayer makes more sense to me when I envision myself in a boat tethered to the shore (God) and prayer is the process by which I pull myself to it/Him – pull my will in line with His.
Still, I often feel tossed around by the huge waves of confusion. I squint to even see the shore, desperately trying to hold on to the rope that tethers me to to Truth. I have been reading Philip Yancey’s book on prayer and find I’m in good company.
“The only final solution to unanswered prayer is Paul’s explanation to the Corinthians: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.’ No human being, no matter how wise or how spiritual, can interpret the ways of God, explaining why one miracle and not another, why an apparent intervention here and not there. Along with the apostle Paul, we can only wait, and trust.” Philip Yancey
What has your experience been with understanding prayer?
I’m trying to get my feet back on the ground after a stretching season, so today, a re-post from 4 years ago.
I ran into a 23-year-old friend the other day and asked how she was doing. “Being in your twenties is…awkward!” she answered. “All these questions about what you’re going to do with your life…who you’ll be, where you’ll go…what to say ‘yes’ to.”
That same day I had coffee with a fifty-something friend who said her son is wrestling with some of the same unsettledness, and she herself is in a time of transition that has raised questions about God’s direction. She said, “I thought by this age I’d have it figured out and be cruising along!”
24 hours earlier I had had dinner with a thirty-something friend who said, “My life looks a lot different now than I thought it would.”
Each person’s situation was different, but there was a common theme. If I were God (a job that’s apparently already taken) I’d give detailed instructions like:
“Susan, I want you to move to 673 Elm St., Provo Utah, join the Church-of-People-on-the-Right-Track, take the job with State Farm, (not General Mills), and order the tomato soup at Panera for lunch.”
And sometimes in the Bible God does that, like when God gives Ananias specific instructions (Acts 9:11) to go to the house of Judas on the street called Straight, (Love it!), but often it’s a bit fuzzier, like in Acts 15:28 where Paul writes, “It seemed good to us and the Holy Spirit…”
When I’m in seasons of discernment and transition, the three words that I feel like God often whispers to me are “Open your hands”
Open your hands…to release your plans in favor of God’s. Acknowledge your dreams, but don’t clutch them. Release them to God to change, add, refine…
Open your hands…to receive counsel from wise advisors who know you well, but don’t clutch it either.
Open your hands…to use what God has put in them, whether that seems like saying “yes” to dramatic invitations, or something that seems very small and quiet. Respond to what God has put right in front of you.
That’s just me. What has been helpful to you when making life decisions? What have you sensed God whispering to you?
My phone pings and I look at another text update from my sister-in-law.
My brother David, who is two years younger than me, my brother who is strong and fit, my brother who is faithful and kind and always has a great sense of humor, has cancer. Stage 4.
And day and night we, his home team, in the bleachers and on the bench, pray for healing. For relief from unbearable pain and nausea, for strength and courage.
We are a family of Jesus-followers with a long heritage of belief and a sound-track of “Great is Thy Faithfulness”. We trust in a giant of a God. We know without a shadow of a doubt that our God is powerful and loving and can heal David with both hands tied behind His back (so to speak).
In the past two years one of our closest friends was healed from Pancreatic cancer. Unheard of. A miracle. Another close friend died of Pancreatic cancer. Both were faithful, both trusted the goodness of God and the power of prayer.
So what do we do with that as we walk with David through this fiery furnace? How do we pray with total faith and hope for the kind of healing we want for David while acknowledging that, for whatever crazy reason, it may not be God’s will to show off?
I think the hardest thing we do is to join Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in being “if not” Christians. Continue reading
It’s hard to believe you’re coming up on your second anniversary! In those short years you’ve faced many hard decisions, huge change, and intense challenges. Now, at the end of grad school, you face some more. More open doors and some that may shut. All with their own set of consequences.
I’m writing you this now because Dad and I have been where you are. And I’m writing it here because you’re not alone. Many who read this are trying to discern God’s will – trying to decide:
Should I quit this job?
Move to this place?
Marry this person?
Break up with that person?
Start a graduate degree?
Take this risk?
So today I want to tell you about a time early in our marriage when we were trying to discern God’s will. We felt like we had outgrown the setting we were in and were prompted to open ourselves to a move. We prayed, sought counsel, and explored options. In the end Dad received a call to a large church across the country in a place where we knew no one. In a place with a different pace of life, different culture, and different values.
In both the process of deciding, and the reality of living the following two years, I think we learned some things about God and His ways. I’d love to share some of our lessons, just as I’d love to hear whatyou are learning in this season. Continue reading
