"If there were any place better for you than the one in which you find yourself, Divine Love would have placed you there." - Charles Spurgeon
I think to some extent we all experience that intense longing. That longing for what is to come.
Always striving. Always seeking. Always looking ahead.
Ahead to graduation. Ahead to marriage (or the potential of). Ahead to grad school or some great career. Ahead to all the great ways that God is going to use us in the future. We’re gonna be part of this great ministry, impact these lives, change the world.
As if God’s will for our lives starts after the completion of our 5 year plan.
Could it be possible that God’s plan for our lives started the second we entered this world?
I submit that it is.
Im a big-picture thinker. A future-istic thinker. I love looking ahead. Seeing what’s to come, dreaming about, thinking about, and planning my days to come. The problem is that this future-istic way of thinking is rarely accompanied by the necessary quantity of patience. I have this problem with anticipating the future to such a great degree that I completely forget about what God wants me to do NOW.
The kid that I nanny for seems to have the same problem.
He really likes legos. No, loves legos. Possibly borderline obsessive. And we arent talking regular old legos here. We're talking mega-sets, the kind where you get to build an entire continent's worth of cars, boats, and airplanes, by simply following the directions in the enclosed pamphlet. He's only 5, and has a difficult time figuring out where all the pieces go, so lucky me gets to sit for about 2 hours a day and "help" him put together his latest mode of transportation. This allows me to get quite the insight on how his little mind works.
Putting together the masterpiece, as thrilling as it is for him, is not as thrilling as the idea of the finished product. Every 10 minutes or so, he flips forward a few pages to see where we'll be at that point, and exclaims "awesome! i cant wait till we get there! it looks so cool!" Often he tries to stay at the spot that he flipped to, and start putting pieces together at a further point of the project. Time and time again, i have to patiently flip back the pages to the step in the directions where we really are, and explain to him how we cant just start putting pieces together whenever we want to, we have to put them together in the right order, otherwise our truck wont turn out the way that it's supposed to.
How often do we try to "flip ahead a few pages" and try to start putting together the pieces right there?
We still have a few steps to complete before we can begin putting peices on a further finished product, and need to pay attention to the directions we are supposed to be following at THIS point.
The people that are in my life, the circumstances I find myself in… they are such on purpose. They aren’t just to prepare me for my future ministry (although they undoubtedly play a role there as well). They are my ministry now. My ministry doesn’t begin with a diploma or a degree.
To some extent, looking ahead is healthy. There’s wisdom in being aware of how your current actions affect future outcomes, and wisdom in making plans for your future. But not so much that you lose sight of your current duty.
Be here now.
Don’t forget where you are.
Look behind, look ahead, but don’t ever forget to look beside you.
What you find there is there on purpose.
Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails. Proverbs 19:21
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