After about six years of writing mostly weekly blog posts, there are certain themes that pop up time and time again. It’s a bit of good news and bad news.
The good news is that the lessons God is teaching us aren’t necessarily that complicated, and do tend to fall into some predictable categories. The bad news is that I just don’t seem to learn the lessons despite how often God patiently uses one more circumstance to illustrate what he wants me to grasp.
One of the most prevalent themes is the concept that we humans don’t have the strength to make the necessary changes in our lives on our own. Any significant modification to our thinking or our deeds requires the hand of God to give us the strength and the insights necessary.
I’m sure this is something I’ve done poorly for years, but I’ve been oblivious! It’s just in the last 10-15 years that I’m starting to recognize how little of my own efforts play a role in making me more like Jesus.
I wrote about this next story nearly ten years ago and yet here I am again, lamenting over the fact that I haven’t nailed it even now.
The original story was set back in about 2015 or so when Dale’s dementia was getting worse every day, or so it seemed.
I had a conversation with my pastor at the time about how hard it was to be patient. I told him, “I wake up in the morning, asking God to give me the patience I need, and I go to bed at night, asking forgiveness for not being patient.”
To which he replied, “You are patient.” After a short back-and-forth about how he must not really know me that well, he said something that changed the way I think. But sadly, only temporarily and sporadically. Therein lies the rub.
Here’s how he explained it further, “As a believer, you have the Holy Spirit living within you, and one of the fruits of the Spirit is … patience. So you are patient.”
After chewing on that idea for a few weeks, I realized the wisdom in it. Did it fix everything? Was I miraculously turned into the picture of patience? A modern-day Mother Theresa?
Of course not. But what did change is that rather than “working so hard” to muster up the patience I sorely needed, I concentrated on letting God’s patience flow through me and into my difficult circumstances.
If I could choose one challenge that l could be victorious over, it might just be this one.
It applies to virtually every part of our lives. I know it’s not just my issue. It’s a human issue, and ultimately it’s a sin issue.
We want to be in control and we erroneously think that we have what it takes to fix not only our own problems, but everyone’s around us. God can just step out – we got this.
Recently, I’ve seen several of my friends in just such situations – wanting so badly to fix something in a loved one’s life, even with mostly pure motives. As a fixer myself, I can relate and have taken that role to extremes on more than one occasion.
Dispensing wise, godly counsel is a good thing. Thinking you can force someone to walk the path you lay out for them is not.
Simply put – the control does not belong to us. It’s 100% God’s call.
Let me close with how this could play out in our own lives if we truly understood how God wants us to handle any “self”-improvement project.
- We acknowledge that we’ve been working on this “project” completely in our own strength with little, if any, success.
- We humbly ask God for forgiveness, knowing that this is not how he wants us to face troubles, or necessary improvements.
- We give the control back to God – who had it all along.
- We rest in the knowledge that, not only does God have the love and the power to make this change in us, but that his final result will be exactly what we need.
- Result:
- We have less angst and more peace in our lives.
- The outcome is exponentially superior to what ours would be.
- Our relationship with God has been deepened because we have rightly given control to the Creator of the Universe.
Not a bad outcome, is it?
I don’t expect this post to magically give me or any of you a perfect score in this area. We will continue to find ourselves seizing control away from God (as if we really could), living with less-than-ideal outcomes, and crawling back to God, astonished that we still haven’t nailed this concept!
This isn’t hopeless. My prayer for myself and all of you is that we can celebrate some small wins along the way. We can actually point to a situation where we followed steps 1-5. Maybe step 6 should be asking God to help us recognize the times we do get this right.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Isaiah 55:8-9