Obedience

Well, it seems the house has finally sold.  No matter how long it remained on the market or how many reductions were made to the asking price, in light of this economy it is still a miracle that it sold! What now?  People ask and I instinctively feel compelled to produce an answer. At various junctures of this journey I’ve felt vague, even evasive.  Truthfully, the intent has merely been to let go of the notion that I “know” what tomorrow holds and to acknowledge the Lord’s revealing of each next step.  Even if it felt “last minute,” I wanted to nestle into His reasons and His outcomes.

The pressure to “know the future” comes from every angle – within and without.  Friends and family naturally ask what I will do after this or that occurs.  If questions are answered with uncertainty then some eyebrows raise – to intimate that I am either misguided or lack direction in life altogether.  Has knowing the future somehow become a gauge of spiritual discernment?  The suggestion that I should know where I’m going and what I’ll be doing seems to be the societal norm – but I are not omniscient. I am not “like God,” and letting go of the “need to know” that fosters the feeling of control is a liberating feeling for me, albeit frightening!

Seeing the ingrained need for control has been revelatory.  Assuming I knew what tomorrow would hold was like a security blanket. Working the traditional job, owning a home, a car, and maintaining the pace of normal life kept the illusion well-fixed. When compelled to leave it all behind, I had no idea what the journey would look like. I thought the courage to follow a dream would produce a living similar to the one I was accustomed to. Instead, pretentious boasting about the future and conclusions about God’s objectives were systematically exposed.

The past year was opposite of expectations.  Instead of allowing external events to nurture self-sufficiency, God authored external events to trigger internal events that would demolish self-sufficiency.  The distress encountered was humbling, but He kept me close so that I was never too exhausted or too wearied by fear.  I trusted God (if by a thread) in spite of circumstance.  Even though on the outside it often looked like things were falling apart, on the inside, new understanding was taking shape.  Not a day has gone by without His unfolding grace. There’s always more than meets the eye. The things I thought I wanted would have had temporary results; but the things I could not yet see or even think to hope for were the things that last forever.

I still don’t know what tomorrow holds.  Ask me today what I will be doing tomorrow and I will say that it seems like I will be moving to New Mexico for a season.  Mom and Dad owned a “little piece of heaven” in the Land of Enchantment before their passing and it may be a good place to nest for awhile.  It seems right to me…but who knows, tomorrow a new plan could unfold. I will do what I know to do today, and remain open to the ever blowing winds of change.  Living life in this manner feels vulnerable, defenseless.  The flesh stresses but the spirit rejoices at the hope of even greater abandonment in Him.

Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a city and spend a year there and carry on our business and make money. Yet you do not know [the least thing] about what may happen tomorrow. What is the nature of your life? You are but a wisp of vapor (a puff of smoke, a mist) that is visible for a little while and then disappears [into thin air]. You ought instead to say, If the Lord is willing, we shall live and we shall do this or that [thing]. But as it is, you boast [falsely] in your presumption and your self-conceit. All such boasting is evil.  James 4:13-16 AMP