What do I do in the meantime?
Hello friends! I know it has been such a long time since I have written a post. School started back and if you didn't know, teachers have very busy lives. I am finally on Thanksgiving break! A whole week to recharge and enjoy time with family. This is my favorite time of the year and not just because we get a week off for Thanksgiving and two weeks off for Christmas!
Since I wrote last, many things have been moving right along like usual but many things have not been moving forward as I would have hoped. It seems I am in a season of "wait". Maybe you also feel the same way. Life is still moving forward the same way it always has but, you feel a change coming and you keep praying for it and hoping for it and nothing has changed. This is where we become frustrated and tired of waiting and we start to devise ways around it without God's direction. But if we trust God instead of trying to work it out ourselves, we are actually in a place of complete trust in Him and that is the best place to be! Totally dependent on Him. Its also the scariest place because you feel so vulnerable without a plan and you have to have more faith than usual to trust and wait for God's timing! I just finished reading Crazy Love by Francis Chan and towards the end of the book he said, "We say things like, 'I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,' and 'Trust in the Lord with all y our heart.' Then we live and plan like we don't believe God even exists. We try to set our lives up so everything will be fine even if God doesn't come through. But true faith means holding nothing back. It means putting every hope in God's fidelity to His promises." This really struck me because I am a planner. I look towards the future and try to work out everything in my head of how I hope it will be. I have learned that life never turns out exactly how I picture it to be yet, I still take solace in planning! Now however, I am at a point where I am putting down the planner and fully and actively trusting God and His promises because, I have gotten to a point where I can see no way out without His plan.
Now many people when they stop planning and they say they are "trusting" God, they do nothing and say its because they are waiting for God to move. God has never called you to do nothing! Stop using that as an excuse to be lazy and not serve His Kingdom! So what must you do while you wait and how do you actively trust God in the meantime? I ran across a set of scriptures yesterday from Luke 24:49-53. It is not very long so I want to type it out for you here....
"And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high." Then he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were continually in the temple blessing God." (ESV)
In these passages, God tells His people that He is sending a promise to them. We know that this promise is the Holy Spirit. He tells His people to stay or wait in the city until the promise of this power comes. Jesus then assends into heaven. Now comes the part I want to focus on. What did the people do as they were told to wait? They worshiped God! They went to the city like God told them to with "great joy"! "They were continually in the temple blessing God." It seems like they were happy to wait! They had this expectation that God was going to fulfill his promises so they did not spend their time moping about and crying out to God with many questions of why! They worshiped Him, had an attitude of great joy, and they were continually in the temple exalting Him! This is exactly how we are supposed to wait! If you are in a season of wait right now, don't do nothing! Do something active like praying and seeking his promises in His scripture. Worship Him and have great joy! He has never let us down, we just get unhappy when things do not move as quickly as we would have hoped or it does not go exacetly as we had planned. Put down the planner and rejoice! Keep living and going to church and blessing God! His promises and His plan for you will come to fruition in His time and what the best part is, it will be in His time and will be blessed by Him. So in this season of wait, wait with joy and expectation worshiping Him and trusting him with a postitive and joyful attitude just like the first followers did as they waited for the promise and what a beautiful promise it was. If they had not continually blessed God in the temple they would have missed the promise! But because of their faithfulness and willingness to wait with joy, God filled them with His Spirit and they became the first people to experience this beautiful promise that God still has for us today.