Thoughts swirling around in my head these days...

My blog can be quite eclectic!  Sometimes you get well thought-out and organized papers I've written for school; other times, like tonight, you get a glimpse into the unformed, inarticulate thoughts of my journal.  As raw and nascent as it is, a little of what I'm thinking about these days...

Sometimes I am completely overwhelmed by the messiness of the world, and left clueless as to how to proceed and feel a bit defeated in terms of the task of redemption and transformation.  So much to unpack, so much mess rolled into one.  But I've remembered that my inability to know how to 'fix' a situation does not make it hopeless.  Thank God the future of the world does not lie in my ability to see a solution.  God has been dealing with mess and sickness and complete brokenness for millennia.  He is the King of this stuff.  He knows what He's doing.  So I trust Him.  He deals with mess with such patience, gentleness, compassion, and love.  I want to learn from Him in this way.

I realize how my mind can start whizzing, problem-solving, putting together solutions that will produce the result I think is best.  It is a temptation to then pray my agenda, because of course I see so perfectly how God might work, so God, don't You see it too?  Here is my wonderful plan for how You should work in this situation!  So I try to sell God on my plan, and I get attached to my agenda, and then disappointed when things don't work out the way I envisioned.  And I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with disappointment, but I do think there's something wrong with praying my own agenda.  That's why we die to our own imaginations, desires and burdens for what we feel we should pray.  So then we can engage with God's agenda, if He can be said to have one.  My agenda is limited and short-sighted.  God's agenda is infinitely more wise and loving and caring for the people involved than my own.  So I want to die to my agenda, and get involved with God's.

I also realized that I'm often tempted to tell people, "I trust you" and "I believe in you."  But I have to stop and step back and ask myself if I really do.  Those are nice things to say, but I realized that many times when I say them, what I really mean is, "I trust you... to do what I think you should do" or, "I believe in you... to do what I think is the right thing."  And that's dangerous because what happens when they don't do what you "trusted" them to do, but something else entirely?  That's not really believing in someone.  So I have to make sure that as I say I trust people, that I truly release to God my expectations, hopes, agenda for what they will do.  I don't want "I trust you" to send a message of implicit pressure to do or say any certain thing.  I don't want people to have to carry the burden of my expectations.

I've thought about my life and ways I've messed up and made choices that probably have not put me in the best position to speak into others' lives about certain things.  On one hand, constantly thinking that way could make you live your life with way too much caution.  But it made me realize that in all my choices, I want to be obedient to follow Jesus so that I am ready and positioned in the best possible way (a way only God can position me, in which I cannot strive to position myself) to speak into others' lives when God calls upon me to do so.  I want to be always ready, always prepared--a theme of Jesus' parables.  And the way to be ready and prepared is to be daily obedient and faithful.

This reinforces the principle that a large part of daily quiet times is that they are practice for times when "the shit hits the fan", so to speak.  It reminds me of the importance of daily faithfulness, practice listening, being transformed from glory to glory for the crises.  It totally connects to the idea of being prepared.  When life happens, you aren't scrambling to get your shit together and hear God; instead, you're already on His path, His wavelength.  You've been practicing and now it's game time, race time, whatever.

So when I pray, I strive to be cognizant of the fact that I need to keep praying and keep listening until God tells me I'm done for that time, and then that I need to give the burden back to God, knowing it's not mine to carry. I'm really glad God has the task of being in control, and not me.