Sunday, January 28, 2007

The sermon was hardly into its second paragraph this morning before I was squirming in my pew. I knew before he even started preaching that something was meant for me today, because I was distracted all over the place – one of Satan’s favorite tactics for stealing my attention when there are words meant (if only in part) for me. And once I realized where the sermon was going, I knew why it was for me. Hence the squirming.

It really started last Monday. Before I’d even gotten out of bed to face the week, I was scribbling away in my journal an area of struggle that had intensified over the weekend. I desperately wanted to go one direction but was fairly certain God intended me to stay on course in the opposite direction. I opened my Joyce Meyer devotional book (Starting/Ending Your Day Right) and read these words of hers: Ask God to put into your spirit what He wants you to know. Ask Him to show you things to come and what you are supposed to do. He will give you direction, and you will have much to praise Him for today.

I tried that – but the struggle didn’t lessen any. So that night, when I sat down with Joyce, part 2, I got a real lecture: It is not your job to give God guidance, counsel, or direction. It is your job to listen to God and let Him tell you what is going on and what you are to do about it – leaving the rest to Him to work out according to His knowledge and will, not yours. God is God – and you are not. You need to recognize that truth and simply trust yourself to Him, because He is greater than you are in every way. You are created in His image, but He is still above and beyond you. His thoughts and ways are higher than yours. So listen to God…be obedient to Him, and He will teach you His ways.

Point taken.

Tuesday arrived and I went for my weekly lunch-hour visit at the prayer chapel. I didn’t hide from God the struggle that was still raging in me – there’s no point in that anyway. I remembered that years ago, when I was reading Elisabeth Elliot’s book Passion and Purity, there was a phrase that went like this: God gives us material for sacrifice. And there I sat, on the front pew of that chapel, staring at a very sturdy altar. God was nudging me, and I knew it. Get over there and offer this struggle as a sacrifice. So I “got” over there and started offering. Should have done it three days earlier!

Feeling that my faith-walk for the year would now be back on a fast track, since that was out of the way, I sailed into Wednesday with high hopes. That day, I was reading updates on Josh Buck (if you’ve not heard about Josh, you should go to www.greenhouseministries.org and read the whole story – and pray for him!). His friends added parts of his first spoken thoughts since his accident the week before. Among his first words: If you’re going to believe this faith, you can’t just believe in a little bit of it; you have got to believe the whole thing.

If a man my age, who is suddenly facing the possibility of permanent paralysis can say those words and mean them, then I have no excuse not to do the same. And God pointed to those words and informed me that I was trying to pick and choose my way through my faith.

God punctuated Josh’s one-sentence sermon by the words in my God Calling devotional: You pray for faith, and you are told to do so…Do not want to see the road ahead. Just go one step at a time. I very rarely grant the long vista to my disciples, especially in personal affairs, for one step at a time is the best way to cultivate faith. You are in uncharted waters. But the Lord of all seas is with you, the Controller of all storms is with you…It was when the disciples gave up effort after a night of fruitless fishing that I came, and the nets brake with the overabundance of supply.
I scratched out the parts of my prayer where I was asking for long term information and instead narrowed my focus to the step ahead.

Well, that brings me to last night, when Joyce Meyer’s devotional struck again: God wants to take care of you, and He can do a much better job of it if you will avoid a problem called independence, which is really self-care. The desire to take care of yourself is based on fear. You are afraid of what might happen if you entrust yourself totally to God and He doesn’t come through for you. The root problem of independence is you trust yourself more than you trust God. People love to have a backup plan. You may ask God to get involved in your life, but if He doesn’t respond as quickly as you’d like, you take control back into your own hands.

I’m the queen of the backup plan. In fact, the entire experience in the prayer chapel on Tuesday was the sacrifice of a backup plan. Plan A (a.k.a. God’ plan) seems to be standing still, so I was anxious to get to Plan B (appropriately – Bekah’s plan).

And so this morning, I sat in church, while Pastor Brian spoke about Samuel hearing the voice of the Lord – and how many calls it took for him to understand it was God speaking. And Pastor Brian asked us how many times God had called to us to follow Him. I didn’t want to tell him it was about 437 just this week. I just squirmed.

So even though Plan A doesn’t make any sense right now, I’ve learned that I’m not calling the shots, I’m not meant to see the long range plan, I better not have a backup plan, and if I do have one, I better sacrifice it immediately. What I can do is ask God to show me the next step and to live this faith to the fullest. Not just a little bit.