Imagine yourself as the chief of a nomadic people group in a faraway land that you are not familiar with. Though this people group is under your rule, they all have a different opinion on where our nomadic tribe should move to next. One says we should head west towards the lake because of the fish and another one says we should head south because winter is coming up and we need to be warm and yet another says we should head east because there is shelter and protection from bandits. Then imagine that your leadership instincts tell you to head north and you cannot very well explain why, but you just know that that is where you are supposed to go. Imagine an uproar immediately following your decision that causes you to second guess everything you have ever known about leadership and your instincts. In the heat of the chaos, not knowing what to do, you leave things up to chance and flip a coin to decide because you no longer feel capable of making the right decision yourself and in doing so you flip a coin deciding to go south, contrary to what you know is the right decision. However, in order to promote peace, you allow fate to decide and the conflict ends and you begin to pat yourself on the back. Congratulations!! Crisis averted. Only a few hours after your decision to leave it up to fate, your inner instincts begin to itch at the very core of your soul and you realize that the ”peace” you have achieved as a result of your decision is not peace at all. After doing further research on your decision of heading south, you find that it is downright impossible to find a place that could accommodate you and your whole tribe down south because all the resources required to build a settlement there would be more than the resources you could afford at the given moment. Upon realizing all this, you call a tribe meeting to tell everyone that you were wrong and should never have left the fate of the tribe in the hands of a coin and though it made people happy, it was not the right choice.
If you have properly imagined this in your mind, you probably feel pretty silly and unstable in all your decision making as well as probably not a good chief. You would have imagined yourself exactly as I imagined myself when making the decision of where our team was to stay for the month of July for our Ask the Lord month. You see, as the team leader, I was responsible for deciding where our team was staying, what our living accommodations would be, and for how long we would stay at each location, if we were planning on moving around.
“My instincts” were what I believed to be the voice of God. My people were the individual team members on my team, many of which seemed to have every possible contradictory opinion possible at the time. The coin that was flipped represented an actual coin that was flipped to decide where we were going. And the resources represented money that we did not have to stay at any of the options we found online.
After spending almost the whole week of debrief praying about where God wanted us to go, I felt a strong calling to stay in Kampala and yet others wanted to go to another town called Jinja. When the coin was flipped, it landed on Jinja and it seems like it was decided. Several hours later, I realized how week of a leadership move that was. It revealed that I did not have faith to stand up for what I believed I heard from the Lord. It also showed me that I cared more about keeping the outer peace than I did about keeping my peace with God. That week, in my very limited perspective, it felt like the team was falling apart. People were divided on almost anything that we could possibly be divided over and I felt that if I made a decision I would be taking sides further alienating me from the team members I disagreed with. So, in a moment of cowardice, I let a coin make a decision that God had put me in a position to make. After coming to terms with this, I came clean with my team and a piece of Feedback that one of them had given me in Rwanda came to mind. Don’t be like King Saul who couldn’t wait for God’s instruction through Samuel and decided to take matters into his own hands and sacrificed a bull to God before God’s priest Samuel arrived. You see Saul was about to fight a battle he knew he could not win on his own, however, instead of waiting as he was instructed by God to sacrifice to God, he sacrificed early. Because of Saul’s disobedience, he lost Gods blessing as King of Israel. When I remembered these words and the Feedback that was given, I was crushed and felt like a failure. However, unlike with Saul, God allowed me to stay in my position of leadership and he gave me the grace to realize my mistake and repent before my team. I learned a lot about grace that day and what it looks like to be a true leader that follows God, no matter what. This whole experience, as messy as it was, showed me how God sovereignly guides our choices and that even when we mess things up, he works them together for his glory. He blocked the way to Jinja by not providing an affordable place for us to stay and the only affordable place we were able to find in Kampala ended up being very clearly a divine appointment as I will talk about in my next blog.
