Day 28

Been thinking a lot about my future and my attitude towards it... the last year or so, I’ve lost all excitement for the future, and have gotten really discouraged about each possible choice or career path. But rather than focusing on the pressure to have a 10-year plan, and to take all the right steps to make that a reality, I think God first desires to re-capture my heart. I think He wants to re-ignite the passion to love and serve Him in each individual step, no matter if I see the purpose of the step or not. I think He wants to re-ignite the sense of adventure that comes with the unknown. I think He wants to re-ignite the excitement that comes from knowing that He has made me in a unique way for a unique purpose – one that I am already filling. I don’t think that we are made to fulfill one task or one event or one career that the rest of our lives are simply spent preparing for or looking back on. Though major accomplishments can bring a sense of fulfillment or purpose, they are not the proof of our purpose. Our God does not create beings of such detail and complexity simply so they can spend their short existence trying to prove themselves to Him. We don’t even need to prove our significance to ourselves if we believe that Jesus (aka God’s Son), of His own will, died for our sake. That God himself deemed us worthy of an eternal relationship with Him that He would suffer and die for. That our worth is not something that we earn, but something that was given to us by the One who dreamt us into existence for His glory. Oh yeah, did I mention that our lives are for His glory, and our suffering is for His glory, and our joy is for His glory, and our salvation is for His glory, and the death and resurrection of Jesus was for His glory, and the new heaven and new earth and our renewed bodies and eternal life will also be for His glory? Did I mention that God is the One that is most jealous when we try to withhold praise or claim that any of that glory should go to us?

Anyway, what does any of this have to do with my life or Sri Lanka? Well, I don’t expect that God is going to tell me what to do next. That would be cool, but I don’t think that’s how He usually works. What I do hope is that He would renew my excitement for the future and take away the fear. Not all the fear, perhaps, but the disabling kind. There must be a difference. Philippians 4 says to “be anxious about nothing, but in everything, by prayer and petition, make your requests known to God, and the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus our Lord”. It doesn’t say, “make your requests known to God and He will tell you which path to choose every single time”. God wants our relationship with Him to be one of dependence and trust. The dependence, whether we acknowledge it or not, is already there (try to remind your own lungs to breathe every 3 seconds for the rest of your life), but the trust must be practiced. Through that trust, in that dependence, there is peace. We know that God is God, and we are not, and that is good. My life is not my own, and I am ultimately not defined by my vocation, or even my ministry, though that may be how people choose to remember me. My life is Christ’s and my purpose has been determined by the same One who formed me in my mother’s womb and who drank the cup of God’s wrath on my behalf… for His glory.