When you begin a journey, you always think you know where you’re going, or at least you think you have a ballpark idea. That’s not necessarily true when you give God full control of your life and say, “OK, God, here I am! Give me directions to wherever it is you are taking me.” The truth is you’ll never know just how far God can take you until you give him full control.
Full control – now that’s a problem. Because as human beings we don’t like to give someone else control over our lives, especially here in America, the land of the free, where we have so much latitude over what we do and say and are. And if we’re people who like control, we’re in really big trouble. It’s even harder to give up control when you’re used to having it and using it. But if you’re going with God – wherever he takes you – you have to give him control – over everything.
An elderly woman once told me that we often go to the altar with our problems in hand and ask God to take them from us; we hold our hands out before him, open them palms up, and say, “God, I give these problems in my life to you. Do as you will.” And then we withdraw our hands without letting go of everything, still holding on to little parts of our problems, when what we should do is turn our hands over and let our problems drop to the altar before us, where God picks them up and lovingly handles them all.
It’s scary letting God have all of our lives. What if he asks us to step outside our comfort zone? Most of us like our comfort zones. We’re safe there. And that’s the problem – we like that safe feeling. There’s always a chance of failure if we step outside our comfort zone, mainly because we usually do the walking without asking God to come along.
I’ve worked with a lot of people who like it inside their comfort zone box. No one asks much of them and they don’t have to do much. Inside their little box it’s warm and cozy and very, very safe. It’s also boring and lackluster but that’s the price you pay to be safe, right? Others are the box – they like the rules they know and resist change with all their might. If change occurs outside the box, they might have to change themselves, and this is not good. Then there are those who live outside the box. They are change, and they are willing to change everything about everyone, most especially themselves. They are never static. They are willing to go anywhere, do anything. To those who live in the box and are the box, these are very scary folks indeed.
For most of my life I’d attended one church or another. I left when I felt the church didn’t do what I needed for me. Now, you have to understand that I don’t fit societal roles. I’m single, divorced, and have no children. According to some churches, I’ve sinned so much by being those things that I don’t qualify for becoming a Christian much less for membership. I also don’t fit traditional “female” roles – I don’t cook (I do burnt offerings though), my lowest score on Christian gifts is hospitality, and if there’s a book someone’s had in seminary it’s probably on my bookshelves. I love to write and read, I am enrolled to practice before the IRS, and my job involves immense amounts of technology.
The problem wasn’t that the church didn’t fit me, or that I didn’t fit the church, it was that I was looking for the wrong things in all the wrong places. Instead of looking to God first and letting him show me the way, I went to church and waited to be used. And who did I blame for that? The churches. God. It was all about me, wasn’t it? I complained when no one noticed my oh-so-obvious talents and was aghast when they didn’t even bother to use them. It took battling cancer to teach me that the person who needed to change was me.
No comments:
Post a Comment