Forewarning: this blog is pretty lengthy, but all ties together in a weird, follow-the-leader kind of way. If you don’t have the time or the desire to read it all, get out while you can. Once you start, I’m hoping you’ll be so intrigued and captivated that you won’t be able to stop until the end.
This first blog entry has been a long time coming, and yet it took me a pretty long time to actually sit down and write one. Here’s why: first, I’m a procrastinator, but in more ways than one. Not only do I feel like I “work better under pressure”—versus doing a bit here and a bit there over along span of time—but I also tend to do things on my own time. I’ll put something off and put it off then all of a sudden be ready to do it and BAM! It gets done. Example-when I was born, my mom went into labor on the evening of June 2 and, doing the logical thing, my dad and grandma took her to the hospital. However, I clearly was not ready to come yet because after literally an entire night of walking the hallways trying to induce labor, they sent her home and said come back when she was further along (this is the morning of June 3, 1989). Later that afternoon, my mom woke up from a nap crying in labor pain, went to the hospital, and I made my way into this world before the epidural could go into effect and almost even before the doctor could make it into the room. See what I mean? Granted, perhaps that wasn’t a conscious decision by me, but anyone who knows me can testify that this kind of thing would become a pattern in my life. It’s actually become a joke in my family that after that ordeal, they should have seen it coming. But hey, “You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother's womb”-Psalm 139:13. Even if they didn’t see it coming, He did.
As I’ve come to know Jesus over the last 1 ½-2 years, this has been a huge struggle in my life. I lived 21 years doing whatever I wanted to do and doing it on my own time, and I’ll tell you something ironic: the first time I ever went to a Bible study (how I ended up going is a whole nother story), what kept me coming back was that God had a plan for ME. It was September of my senior year at WVU and I had absolutely no idea what I was gonna do after I graduated. I was beyond lost. But one of the girls in the study brought up Jeremiah 29:11-“’For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to bring you hope and a future.’” Someone had a plan for ME?! I didn’t even have a plan for MYSELF! I had to learn more. I’m sure you can figure out the end of the story on your own. Do you see the irony? What first drew me into the loving embrace of Jesus was that He had a plan for my life even when I didn’t even have one, yet I continuously doubt that plan and struggle with wanting to do everything on my own time or expecting things to pan out the way I see it happening. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 1:25, “For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength.” This is one of those concepts where it’s easy to say “Well, yeah of course that’s true,” but how often do we really apply this to our lives?
Through the entire process of my World Race journey, from beginning my application in October, to not thinking I was gonna go for months, to taking the step of faith and applying anyway, to support raising, to where I sit at this very instant, the Lord has been working with me to break this. There are so many ways, but I won’t bore you with all of them. As cliché as it is, support raising has been His biggest tool in prying my fingers’ kung fu grip off the control of time. I don’t want to go too deep into this because I hate the stigma that all Christians’ only goal is to get money out of people and that is far from the reason that I write this. By no means did I expect to send out my letters and be fully funded a week later, but with our June 30 deadline of $3,500 quickly approaching and my account sitting at considerably less than that, it’s difficult to keep my sinfully worrisome mind from fretting about what seems like a lack of the good Lord’s provision. It’s funny how in the Old Testament God has to keep reminding the Israelites of the same things over and over again, giving them chance after chance, and from where we sit reading about it we say, “Seriously? You defied Him again? You doubted Him again? You’ve got to be kidding me.” yet I know I do the same thing all the time. I’ve seen the Lord’s provision so many times in my life where I thought it was impossible, and Malachi 3:6 tells us “’I the LORD do not change.’” He provided then and He’ll provide now. My friend Lauren told me once that God is never early, but He is always on time. I said earlier that I work better “under pressure” and that I prefer to do something all at once rather than in bits and pieces over time; maybe in my case He does too. He knows me and knows how to work in my life so that I will learn best. Instead of simply seeking His provision, I’m praying for the eyes to see and the ears to hear the lesson that He is teaching me and for the Spirit’s help to trust Him with total abandon.
If you forgot, the whole point of this entry was to explain why it took me so long to write this entry. So second of all, I tend to be kind of a scatterbrain, if you couldn’t already tell. As most people do when they’re young, I was convinced as a kid and even as a teenager that I had ADD or something, despite my busy mind’s lack of negative effect on my school work. That’s not usually the case if someone has ADD. So now I’ve discarded that notion and began wondering if maybe this is just God trying to talk to me/teach me/etc. in many ways. This might sound crazy, but just try to go with me for a minute. Think about the movie Bruce Almighty (hilarious, by the way, if you haven’t seen it). Try to follow me on this one: You have Bruce, who, in his own eyes is in desperate need of divine intervention and proof that God not only exists but that He is good, is given all of the Lord’s powers. I won’t go in much more detail about the movie, but in two scenes, Bruce is going on about His way and starts to hear voices, tons of voices, to the point where he can’t hear anything else that is going on around him. He finds out from God, played by the always phenomenal Morgan Freeman, that these are prayers and that the reason He can’t decipher one from another is because he isn’t listening closely enough.
Sometimes I have so many thoughts buzzing around my brain that I can’t a) concentrate on just one, b) pay attention to anything else around me, or c) stop the so-called “buzzing”. This is one of the reasons that I’ve never been much of a blogger; I can never condense what is going on in my mind into something concise enough for anyone to want to read. But then other times when my mind is wandering I can have these eye-opening epiphanies because things somehow seem to connect, like the example of irony above which suddenly clicked in my mind as I was typing. Do you see the connection to Bruce? My swirling thoughts are like the prayers in Bruce’s mind! He wasn’t listening. Maybe sometimes I’m not listening and other times I am. If that’s the case, could it be that as our minds wander, the sovereign Lord helps our thoughts along the way to make a link to something He wants us to see?
Somehow I’m trying to make the point that I believe my scatterbrained-ness could be the Lord speaking to me, but I’m not listening closely enough, just as Bruce wasn’t listening to the prayers closely enough. I hope that correlation was made clear. If it wasn’t, just forget the reference to Bruce. If none of it made sense, then disregard all of the last two paragraphs and just allow the following to resound in your mind: What could be a way that God is speaking to you where you are not listening? Are you listening to Him at all? Do you trust that His knowledge surpasses your knowledge? Where in your life do you need the Spirit to intercede and help you to have full faith in God’s plan and His ways?
Please continue to keep my team and I in your prayers. Only 1 ½ months left until training camp and 85 days until we leave for our 11 month adventure!
—Hebrews 12:1-3
