Life in the process

This morning I read my friend Molly's blog and it was just exactly what I was going to write about, the sermon I heard in church yesterday. So kudos to Molly for beating me to it!

Todd is preaching a series called "Greater Things" and he's basing it off of the book "Wild Goose Chase" by Mark Batterson. Yesterday he talked about "The Cage of Assumptions" and the story of Abraham. He pointed out that God made Abraham a promise to make him a father of a great nation, when he was 75. But Abraham didn't see a payoff until he was 100 years old. You can do the math, that's a long time. In fact, that's about as old as my friend Molly is.

For me the promise that I cling to is that God will give me the desires of my heart. There's a lot of specifics wrapped up in that promise for me. You can extrapolate your own I'm sure. I think I've seen pieces of that promise fulfilled and probably won't see others till I see Him face to face. But for a big part of it, I'm still in that waiting. The majority of our lives are spent waiting. For me it seems like all my life has been spent waiting.

That waiting time Todd called that time "the process". The humbling revelation I had was that sometimes we cling to the promises and yearn for payoff but we struggle and squirm in the process instead of resting and trusting. It's in that process that we can get sidetracked by our feelings, our agenda and our disbelief. However we really live if we live by faith in the midst of the process. It's in the process that God teaches us. It's in the process that God reminds us that he loves us. It's in the process that we ask questions and grow. It's in the process that we see a picture bigger than what our eyes can see.

Right now I am definitely "in the process". Being single, being unemployed, having cancer are definitely not all part of those promised "desires of my heart," that I talked about. But unlike other times in my process I've been able to rest and trust. I wish I could tell you why and how other than prayers of many and the presence of the Holy Spirit. Believe me, I've struggled and squirmed some but so far God has been able to quiet those assumptions and remind me of His truth. One of the great things about God is that even when we lose sight of Him, He never loses sight of us. He picks us up and puts us back on the track of faith when we fall off. It's my prayer that in this process time that I really live.