If you’ve got kids, you know mealtime can be funny, frustrating, and a whole other host of emotions.
A few years back we were having breaded shrimp for dinner. My son is well known for being pretty quick to eat whatever’s in front of him, whereas his younger sister can take much longer to clean her plate. My son gobbled up everything in front of him and then more or less hung around while the rest of us caught up to him.
My younger daughter mostly ate the sides before starting on the shrimp. Looking around at other peoples’ plates, she saw little leftover bits of shell. When she asked about it, we showed her how to pinch the tails so she could get the meat without eating the harder shell. As she started getting the hang of it, my son spoke up and said “wait, those shrimp had tails?” It turns out he had eaten everything, shell and all, for each of the shrimp on his plate.
Although my son probably wouldn’t like this tie-in, the book of Proverbs describes wisdom as something to be received through instruction. (Sorry buddy, don’t take offense…) “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but a wise man listens to advice.” -Proverbs 12:15
Sometimes we’re simply unaware that either what we’re doing isn’t the best way to do it, or that we’re missing out on something other people have insight into. Don’t be so impressed with yourself you don’t even take the time to consider that you might be able to listen and learn from others. With a little humility, you can learn from even the people you’d least expect.
The next time someone offers you some insight, don’t be too quick to dismiss it, even if it’s something you already know. People who don’t think like you can often package profound truths in fun ways.
Quite a bit of the Bible covers the idea of trials being used to teach believers to rely more heavily on God. That’s an important concept I think we overlook too often. God wants us to rely on Him. He wants us to take one step at a time even when we can’t see the path things are going to take. I’m going to put a twist on it, though. I’m not saying it will work this way for everybody, but I’d like to share a bit about how it’s worked in my life.
This hasn’t been true 100% of the time, but throughout our marriage, when my wife and I looked around at some of the people we knew who were in a similar life stage as us, we just seemed to have it a little easier. Maybe our version a particular challenge was less complicated, or our loved ones tended to have better health, or we just had trials that were fairly short in duration. It’s certainly been a blessing, but we didn’t want to grow accustomed to it. Concluding that God can take away as easily as He can give, we adopted the saying “to whom more has been given, more is required.” We considered ourselves blessed in certain ways, so we viewed ourselves as able to offer things others could not.
Years back, I finished some schooling I had been working on. It was such a relief! I took a bit to enjoy the sheer amount of free time after completing a years-long endeavor. Soon, though, I felt I needed to give some of that time back to the Lord rather than sitting on the couch and wasting it. I started looking for ways to use the gifts and talents He’s entrusted to me. After struggling for a bit with what that might look like, I settled on an idea. You can poke around the various pages of this blog and see I’ve had a bizarre collection of interesting experiences most people never come close to. I’m also able to write in a conversational, down-to-earth tone that people find easy to understand. The idea for this blog took shape and started getting off the ground, with the work I put into it following the same schedule my schooling previously did.
It didn’t stop there, though. A couple years after the blog started, the world got put on pause as covid spread across the globe. As you recall, the pandemic changed so many aspects of daily life. In our house, I worked from home for a long stretch of time. It was kinda nice…for a little while. Not having a commute was great, but missing out on the back-and-forth with folks at work drove my creativity to find new avenues of expression. A new, outrageous idea started forming. This time gave birth to the idea of a 10-part Christian speculative fiction book series.
To be sure, it’s an audacious goal, especially considering I’ve never attempted anything like it before. I’m excited about the series though, I’ve got the skeleton for the whole thing mapped out and I’m very far along on some volumes, but what I’ve found is that I get bogged down in the writing. I’ve put together extensive notes on each of the volumes, and it’s fun for me to base some of the characters on some of the people I’ve known in person, to write comedy into it, to write powerful emotional scenes, and ultimately point readers to Christ without making it preachy. But…the project has stalled because I simply don’t have the time, energy, or focus (or more accurately, all three at the same time) to make meaningful progress as far as getting words on paper. It’s incredibly frustrating for me to have what I believe is an epic story mapped out, but be seemingly unable to get it into a deliverable format that can reach the masses and become a tool God starts using to reach a new audience. This might sound a bit like I’m inflating my own ego, but in reality I’m simply treating it with gravity and a matter of urgency; I approach it as though the series will be part of what triggers or contributes to a large revival. Going back to the beginning of this post, the stalled nature of the project is something I’d consider a trial in my life.
In this post I’m taking the long way to arrive at this point: even though I’m facing this trial, it’s related to the work I’m trying to do for God’s kingdom, rather than a trial related to my personal life (finances, health challenges, etc.). Of course I’m interested in getting this story out for public consumption as soon as possible, but I believe the challenges associated with that goal come at a smaller cost to me personally than the trials I’d likely be facing if I had decided not to do anything significant to honor God. I believe when people step into the calling God’s given them, He plows the road for them, removing obstacles that would have inflicted some kind of expense on them had they not followed His lead.
God’s going to allow you to face trials in your life. While you obviously can’t escape all of the personal challenges in life, it seems like you get to bypass many of the especially taxing ones when you’re living in the power of God and walking the path He’s invited you to travel. Had I waved off the blog idea and the book series idea, I don’t know what different set of trials I would have faced in the interim, but I’ve also got a certain degree of peace of mind knowing I’m genuinely taking swings at the pitches God’s giving me. I’m in no way qualified to write a 10-part fictional series, but I’m not afraid to give it a try when I feel God’s saying “here, try this.” I’m relying on Him and His timing, and trusting He sees me and has a plan. In the meantime, in the words of TobyMac, “if I can’t walk, then I’m crawling.” I’m still working on it when I can, always trying to move it forward.
I write this to encourage you. If you’re already following the path you feel God’s calling you down, that’s fantastic…keep it up! If, however, you’ve been feeling a sort of “tugging” in a certain direction you can’t explain, and you’ve been avoiding it because there’s at least some aspect of it that simply doesn’t make sense on any level, I’m going to extend a personal invitation to you to give it a try anyway. Paradoxically, the excuses you’ll think of first could be some of the first obstacles to get plowed out of your way when God starts clearing the road in front of you.
God knows you and knows what you’re capable of when He empowers you. You act in obedience, then He clears the road. It’s not the other way around. Try stepping out in faith and see what happens.
Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight. – Proverbs 3:5-6
Back when I worked as a teenaged lifeguard at a Christian conference center, the lifeguards often spent the morning cleaning the pool and running various errands in preparation for opening the pool in the afternoon.
Normally there were four or five of us, and it was fairly common for us to split the different tasks in a given morning. Rather than unlock and then lock the gate again every time one of us entered or left the pool area, we commonly replaced the lock in the gate and set it so it looked like it was locked when it actually wasn’t. It was important, though, that if there was ever a time when all of us left the pool area, the last one out secured the lock for real.
One morning I left the pool area to head to the resort’s main office for something. As I walked into the foyer of the dining room on my way to the office, I passed a couple of guys who were talking to the dining room hostess. One of the guys was very tall (probably in the 6’5”-6’6” range) and probably at least 240 pounds. She was on the shorter side, which made the guy’s size more pronounced.
As I was walking past, the guy was asking something like “is it okay if we go swimming in the pool before we come in the dining room to eat?” The way he asked it, he made it seem like he was thinking down the road to later in the day/week; the pool was only open in the afternoon and it was fairly common for people to hang out in the pool until it closed, then go right from there in wet swim trunks to the dining room for dinner. He seemed more courteous than most by asking. There was something more to it, though. There was something subtle about the way he asked it that made it sound a little off. She had no problem with the swim trunks thing since a lot of people did it anyway, so she shrugged and said “sure.”
I continued to the office to do whatever I was going to do, then not long after I headed back toward the pool. As I came around the corner, I saw these two guys swimming in the water, and there were no lifeguards around to stop them (or help them out if the need arose). I had no idea where the guards had gone, but right now they were nowhere to be seen. There in the gate, though, was a lock that wasn’t fastened.
I forget what I said, but I made it abundantly clear they had to get out. They gently protested, saying they had received permission from a staff member to go for a swim. Technically, that was true, kind of, but that staff member didn’t actually understand what was being asked, nor did she have the authority to grant their request. It was only coincidental that I happened to witness this exchange that I understood what they were talking about. Now it made sense that they asked in a manner that could be interpreted a couple different ways.
I was pretty peeved about this. It felt like there was intentional deception involved. I wasn’t laid back about kicking them out, I was pretty to-the-point. I stood by the gate the whole time, with it wide open while they got out of the water and collected their things. Then as they drew near the gate, the size of the big dude once again became apparent. I was probably 16 or 17 years old, around 6’3”, and about 180 pounds. I wasn’t a little guy, but if this dude decided he didn’t want to comply, there wasn’t a whole lot I could’ve done about it. As they passed me, the big guy stopped very close to me and just kind of stared me down for a moment. It’s not often I have to look up at somebody. Then he took a step closer, so our faces were only inches apart. If this guy wanted to throw down, he could’ve throttled me. Something about his demeanor told me he was just trying to get me to back down. I sure hoped my judgment was right. I didn’t flinch, blink, or step back. After a very anxious few moments on my end, he walked out of the pool area.
You’d better believe that gate was locked within the next 30 seconds.
In a way, this guy reminds me of Satan. By every measure Satan has the capacity to harm you and the advantage he needs to do it…size, power, speed, drive…but he’s limited in the sense that he has to seek permission to cause you physical harm.
One thing he does NOT need permission for is to mess with you. He can harass you. He can snipe at you. He can do lots of stuff to make you have a really bad day, and he can do it repeatedly, in an effort to get you to back down, to get discouraged, to quit whatever you’re doing for the Lord’s sake. He can intimidate you to no end if you permit it, but if you belong to Christ, you can confidently stand your ground and not flinch when those intimidations come.
If you’re following God’s lead and doing things contributing to His kingdom, you’re making yourself a target in the realm of spiritual warfare. Don’t let it get you down. View it as encouragement that you’re doing something important enough to be considered dangerous to the powers of darkness. After all, why would the bad guys waste time harassing someone who’s not a threat to them?
God, it’s so easy to fixate on only the things I can see and hear. Help me remember there’s more than what I can see, and that if I’m living for You, You’re in my corner and are helping pave the way for where You want me to go. Help me recognize and be an encouragement to others that might be experiencing some of that intimidation and harassment. I ask in Your name, Amen.
