Control

One of the things that got brought up last week in our bible study was the idea of control. I didn't spend a lot of time with them talking about it, but thought it was an interesting topic for me to let my mind wander with over here. The exercise started when Stanley was talking about the times that God tells us "no" to something we ask. This may mean when you are suffering with an illness that you aren't healed, if you are in need of a job, you don't get it immediately, etc. It might not make sense to us, but we have to believe that God will still provide. That we have to surrender our control over the situation and allow God to work through it. The automatic response is for us to get upset and claim that we don't want to serve a God that lets young fathers die, or doesn't give us a job to work and provide money for our family. Both are valid complaints, but Stanley than offered the option for us to work it out. He asked that you go home and write out what type of God you want. The next thing that he said sort of made me stop. Stanley said, that what we "want" is for us to be God or at the very least to have God think like we do. Just think about that for a moment, we have our ideas of what is right and wrong and we want to have God agree with us.

But thankfully we don't have a God who thinks like we do. We instead have a God who can empathize with our hurts and fears and loves us so much that He freely gives us His grace (the power to endure) to get through those times that don't make sense to us. We have a Lord who loves us so much that He desires us to call him father and have that intimate of a relationship with Him. The thing that it all made me start thinking about is that in order to do that we have to give up a lot of control, or at least or illusion of control. We have this strong desire to work everything out ourselves. We think that if we can just do this or just do that, everything will work out. This isn't to say that we sit around and just wait for God to do everything, but we allow Him to do what He needs to do and understand that if we don't understand, thats ok as well.

As I have been reading Proverbs, I have noticed lately that Solomon has included at least one verse over the past couple chapters that deals with God's path or plan for our lives. My favorite of these is this one, Proverbs 20:24, "The Lord directs our steps, so why try to understand everything along the way?" We have this desire to try and understand why God would do something. I personally have asked God "Why" when I knew that even understanding why wouldn't have made it any better. Instead of asking why, I should have been looking for His comfort, His grace.

Stephen Johnson on a couple Wednesday nights ago was talking about a personal experience that he had where God was healing him. Each time that Johnson tried to figure out what was going on, God stopped and told him to just experience it. Of course, being a human, this was done many times during the course of the night. However, the thing that I take for this is that sometimes we have to just sit back and let God work. We have to understand that we might not understand. This goes against everything that we see in this world. Often, we get caught up in trying to control our situations and our realities, when we know that there is very little that we can actually control. So instead of worrying, instead of beating our fists and getting angry, my thoughts are that we should focus on the one who can control everything. We might not understand, but if we try to understand, we might miss the healing.