Dear God, Have You Considered Doing it My Way?
I started running as a seventh grader and never stopped.
Now, I don’t mean actual running—I’ve taken plenty of breaks from that over the years—I mean running around. As a high school student, sometimes my schedule would look like this:
- Get up at the crack of dawn to go swim laps before school started
- Attend school from 8am-3pm
- Hit the road for a couple of miles after school
- Work a few hours at the local grocery store (which often involved pushing carts)
- Return home to work on homework
And then I’d get up and do it all over again (all without the aid of caffeine, even!).
If that routine sounds exhausting, it probably was, but I don’t remember feeling exhausted. In fact, I remember thriving. Having something to work towards—a school project to turn in, a race PR to break, a college fund to build up—was incredibly fulfilling to me. And while I’m not up before the sun swimming laps or burning the midnight oil scratching out trigonometry equations on loose-leaf paper anymore, I’ve kept up a pretty brisk pace since those long-ago high school days. As a college student it looked like pounding out the earliest drafts of my first three books on top of a full caseload of classes and working a part-time job. As a twenty-something it looked like earning my master’s degree in social work while working full-time and keeping two tiny humans alive. Even during my stay-at-home mom years, I was always on the go, carting the kids off on any number of adventures while involving myself in a local MOPS group, sometimes as a participant and other times in a leadership role.
Unsurprisingly, the results of the strengths test I recently took, The Clifton Strengths Finder, indicated that one of my top five strengths is “Achiever.” According to the test, Achievers like to push themselves and others toward milestones and finish lines.
It’s no wonder I wound up as a distance runner! There is simply no better feeling than crossing a finish line (literally and figuratively!).
Us Achievers, we’re always on the go. We like rolling up our sleeves, digging into a project, and giving it our all. We have a great deal of stamina and are happiest when we’re busy and productive. Some of our hardest days are when we aren’t doing anything at all—we need to feel like we achieved something each day, or we get restless and discontented quickly.
I bring this achiever tendency into everything I do, whether that’s meal planning, my kids’ birthday parties, and especially in my work. It tends to serve me well; I quickly gain trust as someone others can count on to get the job done.
I’ve brought this tendency into the various roles I’ve held within my church, too. This has also, for the most part, served me and my church well, especially in the early years after myself and a group of about seventy others helped start a second site of our church. There was so much work to be done and very few hands to help do it, so I did a little bit of everything. I served as the nursery coordinator and built up a healthy pool of volunteers to hold babies each week. I taught Children’s Worship and helped launch the Sunday School ministry, stocking up classrooms with supplies and teaching for a while before passing the baton off to more capable hands. I launched a meal ministry and dropped off countless meals to new moms and those recovering from illness and surgeries. I coordinated our small group ministry for almost ten years, speaking life into existing small group leaders and encouraging potential leaders to start new groups. I saw my efforts triple the number of small groups that our body started with and watched with joy as dozens of people found gospel community within those groups.
It’s been rich, rewarding work.
But it’s also been distracting.
Because when you’re always on the run, you miss out on one of the most vital aspects of any long-distance activity—rest.
Rest, to me, has always felt selfish. In my mind, if I’m not doing something, I’m wasting time. Reading through lines like this in my Clifton Strengths finder results was so eye-opening to me:
“You have an internal fire burning inside you. It pushes you to do more, to achieve more. After each accomplishment is reached, the fire dwindles for a moment, but very soon it rekindles itself, forcing you toward the next accomplishment.”
I believe this is how God wired me. It’s a good gift from Him to be used to glorify His name. So, when I can’t reach a goal I’ve set out to do or am prevented from working towards something, I get incredibly frustrated. I want to use my time, talents, and treasures for Him—so why in the world would He ever tell me I can’t do something for Him?
But that’s exactly what He did a few weeks ago. After spending the last two years slowly preparing to step into a new ministry role at church—which included stepping away from my incredibly fulfilling role as the small group coordinator so I’d have the energy to devote to this new endeavor—God said, “No.”
And it was crushing. Not just because I wouldn’t get the opportunity to work towards this new “finish line,” but because I lost another finish line having stepped away from the small group ministry.
With nothing to run towards, I quickly became disoriented, a single question spinning constantly through my mind: Why?
Perhaps King David felt the same way when he was prevented from building the temple. Here’s the story, from 1 Chronicles 17:
God’s Promise to David
17 After David was settled in his palace, he said to Nathan the prophet, “Here I am, living in a house of cedar, while the ark of the covenant of the Lord is under a tent.”
2 Nathan replied to David, “Whatever you have in mind, do it, for God is with you.”
3 But that night the word of God came to Nathan, saying:
4 “Go and tell my servant David, ‘This is what the Lord says: You are not the one to build me a house to dwell in. 5 I have not dwelt in a house from the day I brought Israel up out of Egypt to this day. I have moved from one tent site to another, from one dwelling place to another. 6 Wherever I have moved with all the Israelites, did I ever say to any of their leaders[a] whom I commanded to shepherd my people, “Why have you not built me a house of cedar?”’
As an Achiever, I read this story through my Achiever lens, naturally assuming that King David was probably a lot like me (even though I have no basis for this, ha!). So I can’t help but think that he, like I would be, was more than a little peeved that Nathan, after essentially telling David to “go for it,” came back and told him, “Actually, no. Just kidding. You aren’t the one for this job.”
But if you keep reading, you see David had a very different response after Nathan delivered the news to him:
David’s Prayer
16 Then King David went in and sat before the Lord, and he said:
“Who am I, Lord God, and what is my family, that you have brought me this far? 17 And as if this were not enough in your sight, my God, you have spoken about the future of the house of your servant. You, Lord God, have looked on me as though I were the most exalted of men.
18 “What more can David say to you for honoring your servant? For you know your servant, 19 Lord. For the sake of your servant and according to your will, you have done this great thing and made known all these great promises.
20 “There is no one like you, Lord, and there is no God but you, as we have heard with our own ears. 21 And who is like your people Israel—the one nation on earth whose God went out to redeem a people for himself, and to make a name for yourself, and to perform great and awesome wonders by driving out nations from before your people, whom you redeemed from Egypt? 22 You made your people Israel your very own forever, and you, Lord, have become their God.
23 “And now, Lord, let the promise you have made concerning your servant and his house be established forever. Do as you promised, 24 so that it will be established and that your name will be great forever. Then people will say, ‘The Lord Almighty, the God over Israel, is Israel’s God!’ And the house of your servant David will be established before you.
25 “You, my God, have revealed to your servant that you will build a house for him. So your servant has found courage to pray to you. 26 You, Lord, are God! You have promised these good things to your servant. 27 Now you have been pleased to bless the house of your servant, that it may continue forever in your sight; for you, Lord, have blessed it, and it will be blessed forever.”
Now, if you go back and read verses 7-15, you’ll understand a little more why David so quickly accepted this answer—God told him He was going to bless the socks off of him! Instead of David building God a house, God would build a house for David! Still, though, I have to think David still struggled with this a bit. God’s the one who deserved the house, not David! So, what gives? Why was David so cool with this change of plans?
Because God’s plan was bigger and greater than David’s.
The “house” God was building for him? It was a royal dynasty, his family line which would eventually result in the birth of Jesus. This house would last far longer and would bring God far more glory than the manmade house David had in mind!
I’d really like to say that I, too, accepted God’s “no” with as much joy and understanding as David did, but sadly, I can’t. Instead, I did a lot of pouting.
And then God sent me my own “Nathan,” in the form of a young Christian artist named Josiah Queen, whose beautiful song “Altars Over Stages” humbled me to my core. You can take a listen here:
As I listened to this song over and over and over again, one powerful line kept hitting me squarely in the heart, tears forming in my eyes each time the lyrics washed over my heart
The funny thing about pride is that you have it all your life
But the moment you think you don’t, it’s gotten in your eyes
Whoa-oh
Has it gotten in my eyes?
Reader, it had definitely gotten in my eyes.
Letting go of my pride and surrendering my will to God’s brought an almost instant peace into my life. In the weeks that followed, though, I continued to wrestle with that stubborn, lingering pride; a small voice in the back of my mind doing it’s best to tell me that you would have been perfect for this role and you deserve it because of everything else you’ve done to prove just how perfect you are for it. To combat that voice, I’d play the song again, pledging to the Lord that I was choosing altars over stages and that I didn’t need the spotlight that I was truly craving from this new role.
Weeks later, a beautiful realization that God hadn’t just directed me away from this role to uproot the sin of pride in my life but to do something even greater washed over me. I’d stayed home from church with a couple of sick kiddos, and, after I finished watching the livestream online, sat next to my two young sons as they quietly drew pictures. Sitting at the counter with only the sound of their chatter to distract me, I realized I don’t like being quiet.
But being quiet was exactly what I needed.
By taking away this ministry opportunity, God gave me quiet. He forced me to rest. With my fourth book published and nothing pressing that needed my time and attention, I was spending more time than ever with Him in the Word and in prayer after I tucked my kiddos into bed. Joy bloomed in my heart at this realization; God had given me a much greater gift than what I’d had in mind.
Himself.
That’s all any of us needs, dear reader. It’s the greatest gift we will ever receive.
Questions to consider:
- How do you normally react to God moving your life in a different direction than you planned it to go? Why do you think that is?
- How often do you seek God’s will when you make plans in your life?
- How can you choose altars over stages in your life? Is there anything you need to surrender to God?
