About six months ago, I was meeting with my small group at church. The topic of discussion was “If you could do anything, and God told you that you would succeed…money, time and ability are no object…what would you do?” As we went around the room, almost every person said something like, “Well, I can’t do anything about world hunger, or people who have no water to drink, so I’d choose to do X.”As person after person said the same thing, I started to get piqued. Naturally, I’d never let my friends know that I was sitting there judging their innermost desires and passions, so I started to argue with them in my head. “What do you mean, ‘I can’t do anything about…’?! The idea is that God promises you will accomplish whatever you choose! How can you think so little of God. That almost feels like blasphemy.” Since “blasphemy” isn’t a word you’re likely to hear in our church, I realized that I should probably check in with God, rather than continue freely criticizing my friends.
“God,” I asked, “How have we failed to imbue those in our group with a sense of trust in how big a God You really are? Why would they think that even if You promised they could accomplish anything, there would be problems too big for them to tackle?”
Note: When your prayers include a lot of “them”s and “they”s…it’s a pretty good bet that you are about to get a swift kick in the you-know-where by the God who loves the “them”s and the “they”s as much as He loves you. You can be sure that He loves you way too much to let you stay focused on the “them”s and the “they”s for very long. Sigh…
“Child, is it easy to follow Me?” Whenever the God of Creation asks me a question, I know my pride has just caused me to fall flat and skin my nose. “Well, no Lord, not always. But we said, ‘God has promised that you will not fail.’ That should make it easy!”
“If I said the person who would bring water to every person on the planet was in Raleigh, would you follow them?” “Of course I’d get on board. I’d help! I’d make copies for him, pray, make phone calls, coordinate speaking engagements, whatever he needed. How could I not?” Deep inside, of course, I was feeling very spiritual. It’s always nice when you know the answers to the test.
“What if that person were you?” “Umm. Well, no, see… Well, it wouldn’t be me because… You see, Lord, I wouldn’t be the right… Crap. Fine. Ok. I see. I’ll just be quiet now.”
God hasn’t told me that He is going to use me to bring drinking water and adequate sanitation to every person on the planet. But, He hasn’t told me that He isn’t going to use me, either. So, my goal is to become a bridge between the people who have the know how to bring water to those who need it, and those who want to participate in the miracle God is doing to get the money and volunteers to those organizations. And that’s the purpose of this blog. So, hello world…here we come!
