Not always eye-to-eye

I know that my intentions are not always in alignment with God's intentions for my life. Whenever the intentions of my heart are not the same as his, I find I can get into a funk for a while as I try to figure things our in my life. The things God is doing may not be the things I believe he should be doing in my life. His timing may be totally out of the timeline I had in the way I thought things should go. His choice of resources he uses as 'tools' to accomplish his purpose in my life are most often not the ones I would have thought I'd need to have used in my life, but if I were honest here, his ways are not always mine!

Eternal One: My intentions are not always yours, and I do not go about things as you do. My thoughts and My ways are above and beyond you, just as heaven is far from your reach here on earth. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

God does not go about things as we do - plain and simple. His ways are most often different than we could ever imagine in our finite minds - because he sees the infinite 'big picture'. The immediate response when God begins to do things we didn't count on happening in our lives is that we want to argue with him that this isn't the way things were supposed to go. We find ourselves kind of defensive with God. Why? I think it is a little bit of our pride rising up at times, stemming from that belief we had things figured out. It could also be that we realize God's way is going to be infinitely harder than we wanted to experience and we kind of shrink back a little because we know the way he is choosing to do something in us is going to cost us something.

Regardless of why we balk at what God is doing, let me just say that his ways are bigger and better than ours - period! The more we limit ourselves by just seeing or doing things the way we understand them to be done, the more we limit the possibilities of what God can do if we allow him to use the resources he has designed for use in our lives. I might liken this to my workshop - not every tool is used everyday. When I have the need to produce a finished edge, with some form of 'flare' to it, I need the router. I don't finish every straight edge with the router, though. Some straight edges just need a little sanding. To limit myself to the use of only one tool is to limit the creativity of what can be produced in that workshop!

When we limit God to use only certain resources (tools) in our lives, we are saying we only want one form of 'edge' in life. We are trying to curtail his creativity in our lives! Alone, I have a marginal degree of creativity - with him, the creative process is magnified infinitely. It isn't me doing the creating, though. I may participate in the work, but he is the one who has the design in mind and knows specifically if the edges will be simple or delivered with a flare. Just sayin!