The process of obedience to the Lord is a lifetime one. All He wants is more of us and our willingness to ultimately follow Him at the end of the day. This is something the Lord has been convicting me of since being at debrief this last weeks in Panama City.
After experiencing the jungle and having a strong desire to go back and serve long term there, I started thinking about what I need to do to prepare and what that preparation could look like. God has been extremely faithful throughout the past 6 months to confirm and reveal to me the desires of my heart as well as remove past confusions and doubts. He has gently pursued my heart and confirmed who I am in him and that EVERYTHING belongs to him. My heart, desires, my thoughts, ideas, my money and possessions all belong to Jesus, the one who created me and everything around me. It all goes back to God.
Yet, I continued to take the desires that are ultimately His that He placed in me and took them as mine and began to run with them. Assuming that because they were desires that the Lord placed in me that my timing for those desires were also God’s timing. That is when I realized how little I trust God for future plans but love to put my grimy hands all over them. One of my desires and prayers coming into the Race was for me to learn to back off and give over all the control to the Lord. I want to trust Him so well that I will give up things I want or do things I don’t want to do because it means I get to obey him.
An analogy came to me the other day about the way I want my daily walk in obediance to the Lord to look like. We take public transportation regularly and they often are over-packed with people. There is a learning curve to riding buses, in learning etiquette, how to hang on if you are sitting or standing and so on. Often you have to stand and after awhile you learn how and where to grip the bars to keep yourself steady. Sometimes you need two hands or sometimes all you have to do is lean against the railing. A seat might open and you get to sit down and rest but a time may come when someone gets on the bus who needs the seat more than you and you stand up to give them the seat. That is how I want to walk with the Lord. I want to learn how to obey in all things, know how to steady myself in him and how to hang on when it is rocky, or just rest in him and to be so in tuned with the Lord that I can bear others burdens when they need to rest. I want to be a good rider in my relationship with the Lord.
As the Lord was revealing all this to me He starting planting something else in my heart that I did not want to do. I pushed it aside at first but it just came back. After wrestling about it with the Lord something one of my teammates said struck me. “At the end of the day I will always choose to obey the Lord.” Yes Lord. That is what I want. I realized that ultimately what I believe He is asking me to do I have peace even though my flesh and mind don’t fully agree. He asks us to obey because of who HE is and not because of what or how we think. So at the end of the day I will choose to obey the Lord. Will you?
