I had coffee the other day with a new friend and a couple of my dearest friends, and this new friend is called into full time international missions. The wisdom that comes from someone who knows God in a way that their calling is as clear as day is astounding, and the advice I received on Saturday was so valuable that I didn't realize its power until Monday morning.
So I do this thing--this thing where I try to take my past, my current ideas and the vision of the future that the Lord has given me, and I try to fit them together like a VERY complicated math equation as an attempt to figure out how and why it will all work out like it has and will.
My friends know me as the girl who is ready to step out on a whim, the girl who will jump into the darkest of waters if it is the Lord's will, and do it solely on trust and obedience. But this morning I am convicted that maybe I'm not as good at trusting as I put off to others, for what kind of child truly trusts their mother and father if all they do is sit and strive to figure out every in and out of how they are being raised? What kind of trusting child says that they faithfully trust their elders when, at the same time, they are desperately searching behind the scenes for the ability to do it on their own? No trusting child does these things.
A lot of the time, I am a hypocrite in my encouragement to others. A lot of the time, I tell loved ones, "God is not meant to be understood. If we could fit His ways into a box the size of our minds, he wouldn't be a very powerful God." I encourage people with sayings like, "Trust God. He hasn't failed to follow through at this point, so why would He start now?," and "You just have to walk in obedience. No questions asked, simple listening to the Holy Spirit within us for the guidance we are promised provision for." I believe these things, and the past year of my life has been carried out through these truths, but today, as I am preparing to embark on the most significant and most terrifying venture of my twenty years of life, I realize I am no longer living out these truths to even the smallest degree.
You see, humanity is not good at the level of math that God's ways sit on, and every attempt that we make to put one word from Jesus as x and another calling from God as y is sure to crumble. Maybe its the Lord's way of reminding us of His sense of humor, but at this point, I honestly think that as soon as we stop trying to solve our life's equation and embrace the challenge as it is, we will receive understanding to the best of our human ability. We may never know why we heard x, and we may never understand how we will get to y, but our ultimate superpower is trusting the Solver Himself.
So what does this look like--this blind faith I hear everyone speak of?
I have been in the book of Isaiah for a couple of weeks now, digesting the richness of written prophesy, and this morning I read something that resonated so deeply with humanity's daddy issues:
Look to the rock from which you were cut, to the quarry from which you were hewn.
(Isaiah 51:1)
Israel was cut from the rock of Abraham and Sarah, a rock which was old and barren and seemingly hopeless in terms of creating descendants. I love the story of Abraham and Sarah because of the challenge we receive to trust God to the fullest. Maybe it was at the exact point that Abraham stopped trying to figure out how Sarah would bear a child in such old age that he was provided with a pregnant wife. Maybe it was the exact moment that Abraham said, "God, I put this at your feet and trust that you will fulfill your promises, like you always have," that the promise was even more fully delivered. And maybe its the point when we say, "Lord, I trust you enough to not even attempt to figure out the wonder of your ways," where He will flip our lives upside down into something we never could have ourselves imagined.
Not only are we cut from a rock that was once barren and made beautiful and prosperous by the Lord, but we are also cut from the Rock of the Cornerstone. And that comes with more promise than we could ever care to solve the equation of.
Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than we could ask or imagine, according to the power of his work within us.
Ephesians 3:20
