I'm writing today to make it official that I am giving up. Michael and I have been trying to "figure out" God's will for our lives for so long now. It's exhausting. The Bible tells us to seek God with all our heart and we will find Him. Well, it's not that we've lost Him...we've always had Him. We just can't seem to read the language written in the next chapter of our book. Our secret decoder ring hasn't yet arrived.
So, in the meantime, we keep trying to figure it all out on our own. Something unusual will happen and we try and spin it to fit what we think is God's will for our life. Or someone will say something profound to us and we will try and make that fit into something God is trying to get us to hear. Or we will read something and try to fit that into this box we have our future in. The only problem with this is that we think we know what God wants for us, when in reality, we really don't know anything! So many things keep happening that we think is God's will for us, but then they aren't coming to fruition. We've thought we've found God's will about 20 times in the past 2 years that we've surrendered our lives wholeheartedly to His service. But yet, we are still here doing the exact same things we were doing 2 years ago. And being quite successful at those things, by the way.
So, we've just decided to give up! Give up trying to put God in our little box of what we think is right. Give up listening to what other people think God is doing in our life. Give up reading into everything that happens as some big cosmic answer to our question. I sat reading Ecclesiastes yesterday (I'm a few months behind in my One Year Bible, but at least I am still reading) and Solomon kept talking about how everything in life is truly meaningless. Even human wisdom and trying to figure everything out is meaningless, because no one knows which way the wind will blow or what will happen. So, basically, STOP TRYING TO FIGURE IT OUT! "Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God's work from beginning to end." (Ecc. 3: 11)
God is using us right where He has planted us. And we are filled with joy. It's not that we will quit reading our story, but we will wait patiently for God to finish writing it. We will just keep on walking the road we are on until God puts a turn in the road. And if it's His will to keep us doing exactly what we are doing, then so be it. I will be beautiful in the time God has prepared for me right now.
