Have you ever analyzed or studied something to death and had it worked out in your mind as to how you thought it should happen? Well, I sure did when it came down to the Marathon. On one of our particular training runs we ran 22 miles and those 22 miles were done at our goal pace which would have put me finishing at 4 hours and 9 minutes! I was so excited. That was the fastest I had ever run 22 miles before and I had felt good during the run so I was very optimistic about race day! Well….as you have seen from the previous posts about the marathon that is not what happened! I was incredibily discouraged later thinking about it and my thoughts immediatly turned toward my relationship with God.
Often times we have something worked out in our head and think we know how it should all come about and we pray and pray and pray….yet, things just seem to come apart at the seams! What do we do when things don’t turn out the way we want them to? What then? Maybe we thought we were walking in God’s will – maybe we thought we had heard clear direction from God…..what do we do now? Have you ever felt that discouragement that comes in these times? Have you ever felt hurt with God during times like these? You may not care to admit it out loud but my guess would be that we all have encountered those same old feelings when things just don’t work out the way we planned or hoped that they would.
One of the reasons why so many Jews in Jesus’ day missed seeing who He really is was that many of them had it built it up in their own minds that He was going to be a present day radicalist and overthrow the Roman Government which they ovbiously opposed. We tend to get just a little bit of information about God and then mix it with the influences in our lives and then put our own twist and ideas on it and that becomes our concept of who God is and how God should move and act in the affairs of life and the world. When we do this we will miss Him by a country mile just as many of the Jews did in the gospel writtings.
I want to share with you some very special verses that I encountered for the very first time when my father passed away in March of 1992. You may find it interesting to know that the first time I heard these verses it was not from a preacher, teacher or from my own Bible readings but from God himself. I had been reading the night before and my load of grief blurred my understanding of what I was reading and I found myself in the midst of my own anger over the grief that I felt. I just did not understand why God would not have chosen to heal my father when he had loved and served Him and we had prayed in faith. I had several doctor appointments scheduled the next morning while I was still home and the second visit was at the eye doctor’s office. I knew I would be waiting for awhile and as I began to wait Father invited me into a dialogue with Him. As I poured out my questions He spoke truth into my heart and peace has been the result ever since. Part of what He shared with me I later found out was taken straight out of Isaiah 55:8-9 “For my thought are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.”
On this side of eternity we are never going to understand some of the ways in which God moves and some of the decisions that He makes for we think with earthly minds that are finite and our God is so infinite! He is beyond our understanding and comprehension while we have to function with the limitations of these earthly minds and bodies; but isn’t it wonderful that He still desires relationship with us and loves us unconditionally? Wow….He amazes me – daily! Just another reason that shows why He is God and I am not.
Dana