Grab Hold and Run

“As for God, his way is perfect…” (2 Samuel 22:31, NIV 2011).

His abdomen looked like he had been on the couch drinking beer for six years, but, in fact, his girth reflected ascites from a liver full of slowly growing pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor. He was smiling today; unlike the way he had left me on his last visit, wincing in pain with severe diarrhea.
He was returning for me to lay out a plan that might reduce his tumor and ease some of his misery. In truth, I had few remaining tricks up my sleeve and was planning to simply increase his pain medicines. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “But about a week ago, my pain let up and my diarrhea went away.”
“Well, thank the Lord,” I said. “You know it wasn’t anything I did.”
We talked awhile and I examined him.
“Where do we go from here?” he asked.
“There are a number of things I could do,” I said. “But you are doing amazingly well. I don’t know how He did it, but let’s don’t get in the Lord’s way when He is doing something good.”
“You got that right,” he grinned.

How many times do I wish I had listened to such words in my own life, “Let’s don’t get in the Lord’s way when He is doing something good?”
How many times with right intentions do I charge ahead with the way God should do things rather than the way He chooses to do things?
We look at God’s plan for the world and His plan for our lives in a logical fashion: A leads to B leads to C, etc. We know that God has designed the world in such an orderly way that this thinking works for most life situations. But by using such thinking, we have a tendency to get ahead of God and say, “This is the way God must do things because it makes sense to me.”
The danger lies when we are rigid with our understanding of God’s plan and we say, “God can’t or God must...,” for in doing so, we separate ourselves from, or even impede, the good He is accomplishing. We must not let our inability to understand interfere with God’s wisdom or His power. God doesn’t like that.
“When we are certain of the way God is going to work, He will never work in that way again.” Oswald Chambers
So when we think we’ve got God figured out and He moves a different way, it’s time to hustle and catch up.

Dear God,
Let me never stand in your way. Let me grab hold of your jersey and run with you, even when I think the finish line is in the opposite direction.
Amen