Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Old Men in Small Towns with Bad Breath
Can any of you relate to this? God has clearly called you to something and you’re just as clearly running from it. Maybe it’s stepping out and befriending a person in particular or maybe it’s larger than that and God wants you to serve in some capacity. This is normal for Christians so don’t feel like the odd one. For me, I know that God has called me to ministry/missions but it seems as though every opportunity I get I’m running from that. I’m often reminded of the story of Jonah, and how he ran from God’s calling. Jonah refused to go and preach to a people he saw as a lost cause. And so he ran. God chased him until eventually Jonah had no choice but to face what God was challenging him to do. As a result of his stubborn running Jonah endured some heartache along the way. I’m not saying that God’s going to use a whale swallowing you and you spending three days in the stomach of said whale to prove a point. But he will eventually force you to make a decision, and the hard lesson I still fail to learn is that in the grand scheme of things, God’s way is much better and contains less hurt and pain. So many times I've tried to justify running from him in my own way, often to the point of even denying the call that God placed on my own life. The truth is, how fortunate are we that God wants to use us? Whether it's volunteering to help out at the Edge or asking someone you barely know to coffee, it's amazing that God would even want to use us in any way. So, how can you relate to Jonah?
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I spent 8 months of my college life running away from where God wanted me and it was the closest to hell I ever want to be. It sucked. Yet even when I turned around and went where He wanted me, the Jonah attitude still followed. I sat on my hill and waited for something huge, when all God wanted was to teach me surrender.
Go where God calls you, but make sure you don't sit up on the hill and wait for the city to burn!
whales come in all shapes and sizes... sometimes it's an illness that lays you flat on your back so you have nothing else to do but lay there and let all the head chatter talk itself out until you can only hear God's voice and have no excuse for ignoring Him anymore. sometimes it's your car breaking down so you're stuck at the mechanic's on a gorgeous Saturday morning and end up reading the Word instead of sleeping in. sometimes it's your internet connection going out so you have to go to Panera and you can't get there until 8:00pm so you only have an hour, when you usually waste four. imagine what God can do with those other three hours...
not, of course, that any of those things have ever happened to me. at least not EXACTLY that way...
a good friend of mine once told me that he'd been praying for me and that he felt like i was busy doing all sorts of kingdom work that was good but not ultimately what He'd called me to. he also said to pray about it because it could have been God's voice, but it might have been the hot dogs he had for lunch.
three years later, i'm still wondering. do you think it's possible to run from God's will for your life, but still be doing life as an active part of his kingdom? it would seem from Jonah's story that maybe you could... Jonah was still being used by God in spite of his lousy attitude post-whale experience. *you would think that being swallowed and partially digested by a whale would do something to you in terms of this whole obedience thing, but we ARE dumb sometimes*
Tho Rich Mullins once said God can use anybody. He used Herod, He used Hitler, He's used a lot of people, good and bad. But the Word says (somewhere - I forget where) that "He called to Himself those whom He wanted." And Rich said, "I don't want to be used by God; I want to be wanted." How cool is it that God WANTS us? He does. :)
Mark 3:13
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