I recently bought a bullet journal in hopes of organizing my life more with a full-time job looming over my head. I've been organizing, planning, categorizing with so much detail how I expect my life to look for the next couple of weeks because when Madison makes plans they seem ever so certain. They seem so concrete. They seem so set with permanent markers and colorful highlighters and beautiful stickers. I feel so organized. I feel so accomplished. I feel so in control.
And that is a dangerous place to be.
This is where satan lies. He is prowling. He is ready. He watches you plan your life and take control. He watches you bring your expectations to the table and disregard God's and then guess what? He lets you self-destruct. He watches our expectations kill the beauty of what God has intended for good. The most common place for this is marriage. Satan watches each person bring their own set of expectations to the marriage and chuckles. He watches them blow up when an expectation is not met. It's like a minefield. Expectations blow up one by one as Satan starts to throw his grenades. He tries to kill what God loves with our expectations.
Our expectations are so unstable. God will change our plans to meet His reality. It is our job to trust Him. Whenever I think of this David comes to mind. David's ultimate desire was to build God's temple. Why should God live in a tent and I in a palace, he thought. Oh, how he wanted to build this for God! Then one day Nathan came and said that the Lord told him that David was not the one to build a house for God to dwell in. What? I can only imagine all the things that David must have been thinking. He was trying to honor God. His intention was pure. Yet God still said no. And guess what David did? He sent up a song of praise to the Lord, recorded in 1 Chronicles 17:26-27, “You, Lord, are God! You have promised these good things to your servant. 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” I can tell you one thing and it's that I don't think that would have been my response to God telling me no. I think my sinful nature would have left me upset and angry. Disregarding the fact that God knows me better than I know myself. That He is both with me in the present, future, and past. Isn't it incredible to know that such a vast God lives right within your heart? That God is better than any Plan A, B, or C that you may have had.
I love How David looked at God's no and saw a bigger plan for him. He looked for the blessing and saw that this no would affirm that his son would also serve as king and be the one to build the temple. If David's ultimate goal in life was to build God's temple he would have been crushed. He would have wallowed and pouted and sulked. But Davids goal in life was not to make a name for himself. His Goal in life was to please the Lord.
I love when God so sweetly reminds me that I am limited by time, while time is literally a slave to His Majesty. We have earthly restraints corrupting our minds that hinder us from seeing the perfect way that the Lord is making. I love how God sweetly picks up my bullet journal with all my pretty stickers, markers, and cursive writing and crumbles up each page, saying my plans are better for you. Every no leads to a yes. Every closed door leads to an open one. And those opened doors are bigger and better than you can ever imagine. Why you ask? Because they were handcrafted by God. Let God lead you because when you let Him lead you will lack nothing because he is everything. With this glorious source of strength in us, we must live a life of reckless abandon for God. This starts by knowing that God is with us in every no and every yes. No matter how minimal the task He is concerned with every detail of our lives. He is a luminous veil of light, bringing it to everything around us, showing us the clear path one step at a time.