God's the better Author

Just Give it Time - Jon McLaughlin

Still waters, heavy hearts
Plans we make all fall apart
Disillusioned and lost in the gray
How can we fix the heart when it breaks?
Don't know how much more you can take

Just give it time
It's gonna get better
Now is not forever at all
Just give it time
Everything changes
Tomorrow comes today will be gone
Everything's gonna be fine
Just give it time, give it time

Quiet landslide when nobody knows
Regretted decisions that nobody chose
Under water and sinking fast
No way out, no way to get back
What might have been is lost in the past

When the world you're in is still again
And it all fades out
You've reached the end, begin again now


So, this song was God's response to my impatience. He told me to wait once, but like a typical human, I still would naturally want to follow my own ideas rather than His. I've probably learned this lesson one thousand times over, that God's plan is better than my own. It's the reason I'm at Lee, it's the reason I know what I am supposed to do now, it's the reason that I am who I am.

But I don't get excited and I don't jump to conclusions. I wait. That's how I do things... but this time, it's different. I want to write the story, but I have to remember that God is the better author. He wrote creation, and He will write the story I long to live. It will be beautiful, and it will be His, and it will be mine, and it will be ours. And while I might be able to write a story worth hearing, it would not be original, because only God has that kind of ridiculous creativity. Where mine would just be drawn from other's, His is uniquely written for me, for us.

Okay God, You write the masterpiece. Let it bring glory to Your name, and never mine. I thank you for writing me into it, and it romances me that You would make me a main character. You, the Grand Author, and I, Your creation to mold and shape and develop as the story unfolds. I am waiting, God... for that part when my story collides with another. For that "Part 3" or "Part 5" or whatever it should be called. But I will embrace the story that is currently being told, while I wait to hear what You have written for later.

The night drags on forever... waiting void your voice

Am I bitter? I don't want to have been effected so much by certain things, by these feelings of inadequacy and failure, but it's hard. It's so hard.

Last night Pastor Tom Sterbens came to Lee. I LOVED him. Probably one of the best, most sincere guys I have ever listened to, and I mean that with all sincerity. He said some pretty memorable things.

First of all, he told us that forgiveness is refusing to allow anyone but God to fill our need or validate us. It's saying that where someone else didn't show us our worth, we won't remember that or hold onto that because what they said doesn't define us. God wants to be the one to fulfill us, and by forgiving we allow Him to be the one who tells us who we are.

So I have to forgive, and believe God when He says that I am adequate, and I measure up.

Confident: to be persuaded, to be convinced, to trust.
He asked us to examine our confidences. We are all confident about something, even those things that are not right. I was confident that I wasn't worth fighting for. I was confident that those who thought they were better than me were right. But though God's redemptive purpose, He wants us to surrender what we are confident about and allow Him to define our confidence though Him. Pastor Tom told us that Paul was confident about who he was, even when God knocked him off his donkey. But God erased all that Paul was convinced of, all that he was sure of. Later on, Paul tells us about the confidence that God replaced his with:

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." -Romans 8:38-39

I want that kind of confidence to completely replace the false confidences that this life has convinced me of. I am not less than them, I and my relationship with Christ is no less valid. Paul knew that Christ's love was beyond anything in life. His trust was placed in the fact that God loved him, and Paul refused to allow anything to come between him and his confidence, his sureness, his trust in God's love.