Here Goes Nothing...First Attempt at a Blog Post

I have been really struggling with a sense of direction lately. I feel so called to adoption and to medical missions and have been struggling immensely with the desire to go back to Uganda this summer. I really felt like God was calling me in so many different directions and yet telling me to wait but VERY CLEARLY hearing his promise that I will be fulfilled in his time. I don’t do “wait and see” very well and I definitely don’t do well without clear direction and purpose. With that being said, you would have thought that Michael telling me that he didn’t want to go on the mission trip this summer would have been a clear enough answer for me that it was not meant to be. But alas, that was not the answer I was looking for so I grew angry. Angry at Michael. Angry at God. What give me a heart for Uganda without the intentions of sending me back? Why give me a heart for orphans but not give Michael that same passion? Why? Especially now that our family has been so blessed financially and we have the means to do all the things that God has laid on my heart I find myself questioning God and His plan and timing. I have grown very distant. If God is not going to fulfill me in the things that I want to do then I am just going to go about my life as usual. That didn’t last long. God was tapping, or more so beating, on my heart today. I decided it was time to get back into the word and the routine of daily quiet time. I prayed that he would give me a good clear answer as to what he wanted me to study and without any real sense of where he was going to lead me I landed on the Village Church app on my phone and found this. “Living in the Gap” a sermon by Afshin Ziafat. Sounds fitting… Opening statements:
“The gap is where God has given us an incredible promise, and incredible call, He’s called you to Himself, He’s given you this amazing promise and the promise has not yet completely fulfilled. It hasn’t been actualized, and so you’re living in this gap between the incredible promise and the fulfillment of it….
So the question is: How do you live? And for most of us, most of our life is in that gap because the ultimate fulfillment of that promise is when we spend eternity with God. And so we have this gap to deal with.”
As if the mere fact that he picked this message specifically for me in this specific moment wasn’t enough, he brought me to my knees. Over and over and over again. Here are some amazing things that I picked up while listening to this sermon.

• The story of God’s promise to Abram in Genesis is the illustration of what its like to live in the gap. God makes a promise to Abram. Abram becomes inpatient when he does not see the fruit of that promise. God remains steadfast in teaching Abram that the reward is not the promise, although it will be carried out, the reward is God himself. 
• A lot of times we feel like God is not working the way we want Him to or on our schedule so we put OUR hands in God’s plan. For me, I believe this is my ultimate sin. My nature is to control. Control my surroundings. Control my future. Control what people think of me. Control my family. Control my pain. Control. When God doesn’t work in a way that I think he needs to and I am forced to relinquish control I become very defiant. I start putting my hands in his plan which does nothing but cause me more pain and heartache. Ziafat said, “You see, at the end of the day, I don’t want to be a part of something, I don’t want to be a part of a life that was me, that I did it. At the end of the day, I want my life to be something that I couldn’t explain any other way but to just say, “God did it.”  That’s what I want. I want THAT life. I want to know that as long as I am obedient to the Lord that I cannot mess up his plan and purpose for my life. I want to know that I if I keep my hands out of his plan that this short amount of time that I have here on earth will be used for exactly what it was intended for. No more, no less.  For that to happen it will require a daily sacrifice of relinquishing my control and desires and repenting relentlessly when I fall short. 

“Woe to the obstinate children,” declares the Lord,

“to those who carry out plans that are not mine,

forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit,

heaping sin upon sin;

Isaiah 30:1

• To live in the gap you must RECOGNIZE WHAT THE TRUE REWARD IS! A relationship with God is the ultimate reward, NOT the promises made or the plans for your life. Yes, God made us a promise that we would have abundant life but you will never be fulfilled in that if you are not first fulfilled in him. I have been so wrapped up in what I thought was God’s calling for my life that I put him on the back burner along with my family. I had great visions of traveling and medical missions and being covered in African babies. God gave me a heart for these things so for a long time I thought I was good and noble and it was my husband that was a stick in the mud for not allowing me to carry these things out. He was standing in the way of God’s plan for my life. Now I say that out loud and its makes me laugh. I can imagine me in a state of “holier than thou” mentally berating my husband for not being “Godly” enough to allow me to bring a tribe of orphans into our home and then subsequently leaving him home to take care of our new Jolie-Pittesque brood while I travel the world on medical missions. That was God’s plan for my life! How dare he stand in the way of that! I imagine God’s retort being something like, “So your telling me that I, the Sovereign King, the creator of the Universe, the Almighty Father, am actually deterred by one individual? I created the universe in seven days but cannot pull together this grandiose so-called plan of mine because Michael Allen stands in the way? I don’t think so.” This is not to say that God will not use my passions in some way, shape, or form and that Michael will not one day share in those with me. This is to say that God has shown me over and over and over again that my relationship with him comes first, my family comes second, and my heart’s calling comes third. I will be fulfilled in His time, in His way but not if my priorities are not in order. True fulfillment will only come unless we are first fulfilled in Him and him alone!
• Ziafat made a wonderful illustration about how God holds his promises and plan for our lives in his right hand and how if we are so busy looking at what he is holding in his hand that we miss looking at his face. We miss the true reward that is God himself.  QUIT WORSHIPPING THE PLAN AND START WORSHIPING THE CREATOR OF THAT PLAN BECAUSE WITHOUT HIM YOUR PLAN AND PURPOSE CEASES TO EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE. 
• I have been humbled before. God has brought me to my knees on several occasions but never quite like this.  Ziafat began to talk about the excruciating pain of the cross, but not the physical pain. He spoke about how Jesus wept and cried out not because of the hurt, although it must have been terrible, he cried out because in agony because when he took on my sin he completely severed his relationship with his dad and God turned his back on him. As a parent I think about what this might have been like for God. You hear how God sent his son to die for us but I don’t know that I ever really understood the gravity of that. As a parent I imagine my child writhing in pain and begging, “mommy please help me” and not only what it must have been like to not come to the rescue but to walk away from them for the sake of somebody else. As I fell into a puddle imagining what that must have felt like I had a vision of what that meant for me specifically. I am looking on from the back and I see God with his back to me watch his son be tortured and mocked. He is watching Jesus cry out for him, “daddy please help me.”  I wait for him to merely nod and unleash the army of angels to come from the Heavens to rescue his only son as I imagine he was aching to do and yet he does nothing. He turns his back and when he turns his back on his baby boy he does this so that he can face me….a sinner, a blasphemer, a naysayer. And Jesus, knowing that the only way that I will ever be able to see the face of God, takes my sin so that can happen. And after knowing the sacrifices made, I still chose to keep my eyes on what God had in his hand and what he could offer me instead of looking at his face….
• If you understood the reward you would give up ANYTHING without ever asking why… If you truly understood what it meant to have a relationship with God nothing would ever even come close. You must diligently seek that relationship. You must sacrifice and then persevere and maintain that sacrifice so that you may have relationship with Him. Persistent sacrifice shows faith and one sacrifice prepares you for the next.
• Trust in the bigger picture. Ultimately Abram never would see God’s promises played out. We have to know that the ultimate blessing is to even get to be a part of His plan in the first place.