Sometimes It All Goes Wrong
Just in case you forgot, I don’t always get it right. Actually, more times than not I get it horribly wrong. But then there are sometimes that things couldn’t go any worse even if you wrote the script for the new Meet the GrandFockers movie for Ben Stiller (that’s not a real upcoming movie. I made that up). It is times like these that make you wonder why it is you do what you do everyday. Am I the only one that has had moments like these? I have put together worship sets, scheduled a band and rehearsals, laid everything out for all the team players, given advance notice to everyone that requested it, only to have 2 vocalists get sick, someone forget rehearsal, 3 people changed their emails and didn’t tell me so they never got the memo about the TPS reports (I’m all movie references today), and then Sunday morning half of the board doesn’t work.
Looking at that situation as it stands, it would be easy to just chalk up a week like this one as a loss. I’ve wanted to do that many times. But it’s times like these that God steps in and does what He was always planning to do. There’s no way to know just how He is going to work, but His work is ALWAYS evident. Something that hit me earlier today. I was writing out some plans on my big board and realized that when God is in the plans. It isn’t like that I didn’t know that already, but people frequently talk about how when I stepped out of the way then God stepped in. Well, my words of wisdom for today is that we (myself included) should be including God earlier in the process. Whenever I spend the time to ask God what He wants me to do before I even start planning, I find that even the planning process goes much better. Then when I get to the end and look back, I can see His hand through the whole thing. Sometimes I may want this huge band, and God wants to break things down to where we are forced to let Him fill in the voids created by silence. Sometimes, He wants to use that still, small voice to firmly guide us toward the cross.
We always look to the famous passage about God’s plans for us (Jeremiah 29:11) because it talks about our prospering and having a hope and future and all that fun stuff. But the plans won’t just pop into your lap as you’re walking down the street. The verses that follow give verse 11 something to stand on. When I go and pray to Him, He will come to me. If I go and seek Him with my whole heart, He will come and find me (my paraphrase of verses 12-13). When I’m planning out my services, I have to seek God out in THAT stage, then even those plans will be revealed as I work. When you are in the beginning stages of a plan or idea, add God then. See how much of the back end crazy gets avoided when you do that…
