After my last bit on being lucky I’ve thought a lot, and have arrived at a few ideas or questions worth tossing around.
I’ve been struggling with the idea of Kingdom blessings, or unearned grace that is realized on earth. It is easy for me to idealize heaven and understand that I didn’t do anything to deserve eternal salvation, but it is a little freakier when you start realizing your whole life you’ve been experiencing unearned blessings.
Sorta goes against my American ideal of hard work turning good results and prosperity and laziness bringing in bad things and poverty. Of course no one complains about this widely held ideal when it is for the lazy becoming propserous when they are the lazy, so why am I bothering to post about it.
Well, this week I’ve been tying some strings together, and arriving at some interesting conclusions. I’ll start with some of the strings I’ve been pondering.
1. I suffer from feeling useless, especially on the church plant team. Jeff, Liz, my wife, and my Dad all assure me that this isn’t the case. At the very least, I’m support Lauren’s potential as an author, which I’m OK with, but don’t find that fulfilling. I feel the most comfortable and alive when I am doing a very specific set of things. Some are leadership based, some are service based, and some are creative. I seem to go at these things in spurts and can’t keep my interest in them for an extended period of time.
2. I have been a leader in small groups in the past. When you are a small group leader, and generally if you hang around more in small group settings (or setting where people open up more) you find out that a lot of bad shit has happened to a lot of undeserving people. If you need proof of this, ask my wife about the year before she met me. This state of events is depressing.
3. I have no vision for my life. This goes along with number 1, where I can’t keep super interested in any one thing, or set of things, for any length of time. For one month it will be web design, the next is being a better sound guy, the next is group leadership, followed by philosophy, historical studies, theology and then praying for people, etc, etc. Once in a while, I even get excited about evangelism…but not often. But none of it sticks. I get a little better at whatever my thing of the moment is, each time I work on it, but I feel like I’m becoming a jack of all trades, and a master of none….especially since my EE degree is slowly leaking out my ears.
As I tie these ideas together, and talk to my friends, I have some thoughts, reactions and feelings that I think are worth jotting down here.
1. I’m really scared that I’m relying on my luck, and not God. If he is blessing me for a reason, I don’t see that reason, and when I trust my gut (or my gift of faith, as James put it) I’m worried that sometimes I’m trusting the wrong thing. Also, I know I can manipulate things around me to get results that I want, but right now I’m not sure of what I want because I lack vision.
2. When I feel useless, I feel like the blessings poured out on me are wasted, even though I know God is probably doing something in me very specific, building for something later.
3. If I pray a lot for certain things to happen, i.e. miracles, vision for my life, etc, and I don’t see those things happen I think one of two things are happening. 1. God is saying “no”, or “your aiming a little to high right now” and I can’t hear it because I don’t want to. 2. God is being silent, or just not talking much because I need to grow. I know 2 is happening as things go along, but I feel like it is horribly inefficient in the time it is taking. I’m open for suggestions, and not getting many from God…so what is he waiting for?
4. There are blessings and gifts I don’t get that I want. It is funny that I have this way of going places and having everything work out pretty well for me, but when I want to experience God in a new way, or a way that I see people experiencing him around me I feel left out. (of course other people see me and want what I got I’m sure) I’m starting to think part of that is appreciating my blessings I already have, and learning to praise God for that. Also, my Kingdom theology tells me that it just might not be time yet for other things to happen. But I really would like to speak in tounges some day, directly be involved in a fairly major miracle when it happens, see a bunch of people come to Christ that I am working with, prophecy for a group, and dream wonderful dreams of the Kingdom going forward that I get to have a front seat to see it all when it happens.
5. My luck, or blessing, that God has given me, or that I have just randomly gotten on my own, is something totally unearned. Here on earth, I have done nothing to warrant the easy parts of my life. Sometimes that messes with me, especially when I feel like I’m not accomplishing much. I’m still lucky, but I didn’t do anything to be lucky. So, why does one person get screwed, and I end up with all this good stuff in my life. I’m not saying I haven’t had tough times, but I’m saying my tough times almost always turn out well. This is especially true when I get a good feeling about the situation. The only time I was wrong when I had that feeling is when my Grandpa died, but I was about 12 then, so I’m having a pretty good track record on important events.
Hmm….long again, and rambling, so I’ll put a nifty cut thinger in here, and mark this up for reading later when I’m past this part of my life and helping someone else w/ some similar feelings. Read it if you want, if not, that’s cool too. Feel free to suggest ideas I haven’t thought of