Yesterday I noticed an epidemic in our society and it really
got me thinking.
I was at Target and
there was this woman frantically running around with her child to get to the
check-out and leave. At one point she
darted into one line, grabbed a soda and then frantically pushed her way in
front of me so she could check out before me.
She then huffed when she got all of her things piled on the conveyor
belt and a sweet teenage boy opened the check-out next to us. She hurried the checkout girl and then ran
out the door and threw everything (including her child) into her SUV and peeled
out of the parking lot. A few hours
later I witnessed more hurrying when I almost got hit by a man last night because he didn’t stop at a stop sign and then raced off into the
night. Now, I am not discounting the fact that these people may have truly had somewhere very important to be... it just really made me stop and think.
I began to wonder so many things. Not only why were these two people in such a
humungous hurry, but why are we all in such a hurry? I constantly have to remind myself to slow
down and really experience things. It doesn't matter what I am doing or who I am with, I have to force myself to be in the moment. To not worry about the next step, but really to be in the moment that God has given me. Why can we never be still, and calm in today
society?
I also then started
thinking about this in alignment to my relationship with God. How often do I race ahead of Him? How often do I tell myself that it's OK to race ahead of Him? I find myself thinking, toiling, and striving to try and get things done faster and better. Not even stopping
to think how laughable it is that I think I can get things done faster
and better than the God of the universe.
I forget that in His perfect timing exactly what He has planned for my
life will happen exactly when He wants it to happen. No amount of worrying or planning can make God's plan for my life happen any better than he has already planned it since the beginning of time. There is great peace in that.
But I think that we all do this all too often, and when we do this
we are really questioning the sovereignty of God. We worry that if we really put all of our
trust in Him then we may lose out on something that WE really wanted for our
lives. Instead of remembering that what
God has planned for us is always best, even if it isn’t always easy or
what we wanted and planned for our lives.
We can find ourselves questioning if He really knows, “…the plans He has for us…”
are they really, “… plans to prosper and not to harm us, plans to give us a
hope and a future…”? I think sometimes if we really look deep into the hearts
of every believer, and non-believer for that matter, we will find the fear that
if I don’t get this figured out then no one else will. We sometimes fear that includes the God that has promised to love us until the very end of the age.
We see in Exodus 14:14, "The LORD your God will fight for you, you need only to be still." The God who sent His son to die on the cross for you has promised in His word that He will fight for you, just be still. I think that sometimes God does ask us to act, but sometimes He doesn't ask us to act. He asks us to be still and allow Him do His work through us. I believe that when do this we can really feel the full power and love of the
God of the universe. When we stop to realize
that we don’t have to have everything figured out, because the one who formed
us in our mother’s wombs and has loved us even the midst of our deepest darkest pits
already has our whole story written out. Not only does He have our whole story written out but he is already waiting at the end of it. We don’t have to hurry and rush around to
figure everything out. If we seek God in His word and with prayer He will reveal His will to us, in His perfect timing. We won’t then, have to wonder what God has
for us and rush to get there, because He will show us with great love and
unending mercy.
He’s already there.
