Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz, Searching For God Knows What) has a blog: http://donmilleris.com. A friend of mine has been sending me links to his posts and they've spurred good discussions. His most recent post is about God having a specific "plan" for your life and the previous about how to get confidence from God. I wrote this post in response to those posts.
A few thoughts. I've experienced first hand in many scenarios that God does not typically give people magical confidence. I do believe that his "supernatural" grace is bestowed on us to help us trust him to do the really scary stuff that helps develop these traits in us by way of experience and learning. There's no way to evade the scariness. I keep trying, but it doesn't work. We just have to trust Him, and jump in, even if we're peeing our pants while we do so. I think a lot of this directly applies to what being a man is all about. Doing crazy hard, confusing, "no formula" stuff where the failure rate looks pretty high from the outset. But once you get into it and through it, you're way stronger, and you can only point to the big strong awesome dad (God) that's helped you through it. Not having had much male influence and/or encouragement (but also understanding I've had far more than many others) through life really makes this stuff hard to do. Again, I've experienced this first hand.
Does God have a specific plan for my life? Yes and no. That's like me throwing down a huge piece of white paper on my kitchen table with the intent of having Elliott and Boaz (my two strapping sons - ages 3 1/2 years and 20 months) draw the Mona Lisa. Even if one of them was equipped with some amazing 'magical' talent to do this, the problem is that he'd have to contend with the other one messing up his picture the entire time. It'd be nice if we could just be on our own little piece of 8" by 11" and have nobody mess it up. Unfortunately, other people are constantly scribbling on our pages. We, too, are constantly scribbling out others' pages as well. It's called sin.
God, being the awesome God that He is, has this great talent (or, rather, intrinsic quality)of encouraging and teaching us. Instead of ripping up our papers since it looks like crap to most of us, He makes beauty out of our mess. He can even use our scribbles to make something pretty. He doesn't give us fresh paper...I think that would steal the beauty of it and allow us to forget too easily that we're flawed.
If any of us do have a specific purpose ordained by God, we definitely still make mistakes along the way.
On a final note, I've been fixated on the life of Joseph for the past few months. The interesting thing about him is that while God had a specific purpose and plan for his life, He didn't come up to Joseph and tell him flat out. It was only through weird, vague dreams that seemed to upset other people. [Boaz to Elliott: "I'm gonna draw the Mona Lisa cause God gave me natural talent and it's what He's chosen/ordained for me to do in life!" Elliott: scowl]. So it seems that the problem isn't necessarily whether or not God has a specific plan for our life, it's whether or not we know what it is, or how much detail we have about it. Furthermore, it's my experience and opinion that the more we know about what we'll be used for, the more likely we are to try to make it happen on our own terms and end up making a big mess. So I think that not having a specific purpose ordained for your life may be the 'easier' ticket in some forms.
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yes! C.S. Lewis talks about the very same thing (great minds think alike, eh?) in his "space trilogy". I'm reading the second book right now, and he has his hero, Ransom, thinking through the exact same stuff you're talking about here (especially the life of joseph/plan stuff)...
ReplyDelete...I love the elliot/boaz exchanges, too!
what fun:)
p.s. Do you mind if I link to your blog on mine?
Thoughts in Response: Perhaps it is easy to assume that when things are not going well that we will never reach our destined mark. But perhaps it is because we don't know what that final purpose is yet -- and we assume it is a dead end, but rather it is "the road less traveled."
ReplyDeleteJoseph's life as he knew it was ruined because of his brothers' envy. It was not fair. IN that moment, lying in the bottom of the pit, and then being shacked into slavery, his whole destiny sold for money -- JOseph must have wondered: What now will become of all my potential. It has been stolen from me, and now I an incapable of complishing it -- whatever "it" may have been.
I do not know or understand why these horrible things happened (or had to happen?) for Joseph to reach where he was going. But the amazing part of his story to me is that he still used his potential -- God still used him. God knew where Joseph was supposed to be and knew what Joseph's purpose was. The resounding theme of his story seems to be that no matter what happened to him -- no matter who got in his way or ruined his life in that moment by his or her own sin -- God made a way and made sure that Joseph's purose was fulfilled.
I think that if JOseph was an only child, his purpose would have been fulfilled. If Pottifer's (name/sp?)wife was never born -- his purpose would still have been fulfilled. I don't think that those people's sin had any capability or power of stopping God's plan for Joseph or where he was supposed to end up. They made it more complicated and severely hurtful and difficult for Joseph. But I think it is an example of how some else's sin CANNOT deter God's ultimate plan for someone's life -- even if that person does not know what the plan is or where they are going. They will reach it eventually....
/mam
By the way -- your analogy of Elliott's picture was amazing. What a perfect parable of how frustrating it is when we are trying to accomplish or work on something and it seems that we just cannot do it -- or concentrate -- or create what is in our mind, because other things or problems or people are interfering...