Exactly 10 years ago this week I put my entire future in God’s hands. (The truth is ALL of our futures are in God’s hands and not out own, but 10 years ago I made the conscious decision to start seeking after God’s will for my life and to live it out.) It was then I knew God was calling me to a different life than I envisioned for myself. The first step was to leave my corporate career for less safe and secure lands yet to be discovered. Since then, God has been unlpugging me from the life I had in almost every conceivable way.
What’s been hard, is God hasn’t been terribly specific or active in plugging me into something new. As I look back now, I can see how if He plugged me back in to something else, I would have carried all the same garbage right along with me to the next endeavor. I tried, actually. I tried really, really hard in fact. That has been (and still may always be) one of my biggest issues – performance driven faith.
I have something within me that keeps me striving and pushing for the next “thing” – not a material “thing” mind you – but the next “thing” I need to accomplish. Part of that drive comes from something God created within me – a longing, an ache for more and more of Him. Part of that got twisted in my mind, heart, soul, and strength somehow. It is only after the unplugging and the subsequent wandering in the desert am I now able to see how twisted it became. (God is SO smart…)
With my 20/20 glasses on, I can see how hard I strived to build the life I believed God wanted for me. I believed if I did all the right things and avoided doing all the wrong things and it would work out somehow. I had fallen into the age old trap that Paul talks to the Galatians about, “Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?” Galatians 3:3.
Not only was I focused on building my life the way I felt God intended, deep down I believed that if I did it well enough – that God somehow OWED me that life. I used to be a programmer in the IT corporate world – it was strictly a logical IF-THEN-ELSE statement. IF I did all that God asked me to do and avoided all the things God commands us to avoid and worked really hard at it THEN God would give me the life I always wanted ELSE it means I wasn’t doing it good enough.
I saw God as someone who kept track of all the goods and the bads and when the goods outweighed the bads, He rewarded me with what I wanted. If I didn’t get what I wanted, it surely meant that my bads outweighed my goods. If we did some deep introspection, I think a lot of us would admit we see God this way.
When I was in the corporate world and living life the way I felt I “should” – that worked pretty well. It was when I turned my life over to God’s will when I became painfully aware of my faulty programming. In God’s hands, I watched the life I thought I wanted disappear before my eyes but not materialize into something else. It was then my life had become a non-ending series of “recalculating” my life’s GPS when I wasn’t getting to the destination I thought I should be reaching.
I felt like I took wrong turn after wrong turn because I was only wandering around and going nowhere. I’m embarrassed to say that it took almost all of those ten years for me to realize, I WAS wandering. God was freeing me from the IF-THEN-ELSE of performance driven faith and was allowing me to wander around for awhile until that freedom became real in my heart, soul, mind, and strength. The Israelites wandered for 40 years after they were freed from captivity because they still remnants of “Egypt” still stuck to them.
Today I am as unplugged as just about any American can be. We live in an motorhome at a camp grounds, I have no career which holds me, our monthly expenses are low, I have very few roots down, and few obligations to tie me down. I sense God will be plugging me into something new very soon that I would have missed if I hadn’t been unplugged. (Again I say, God is so smart!)
So, a bit of my performance driven faith rears it’s ugly head as I ask, “Did it really need to take 10 years for me to learn this lesson? Am I really that slow?” Of course, I realize those are useless and meaningless questions. I’m here now, exactly where He intended for me to be – ready to go on to the next season.
God lavishes His love upon me because HE LOVES ME not because I do this or don’t do that. Being unplugged wasn’t punishment, but grace. God saw into the deepest part of me to realize the life I thought I wanted is not the life I really wanted - and He loves me too much to allow me to stay there. I made a conscious decision to allow God to lead – not just say I want Him to lead. That was all it took. I’ve not done it well, or gracefully, or patiently. But, God has lovingly reached past my pitiful performance to bring beauty and purpose into my life.