I struggled a lot this past year trying to reconcile what I felt God was speaking over my life and what my life currently looked like. It honestly got to the point where it hurt – hoping and believing for God to move, yet only feeling further and further from the good future He had for me.
During my last semester of college, I knew God was speaking to me about Joseph and his life, so I started studying his story. At one point, God had given Joseph a dream about the future where his brothers would be bowing down to him, and yet Joseph found himself in the darkness of a prison. He seemed so far from what he knew God spoke to him about his future. It’s easy to read how the story ends and be like, “God was working all along!”, but when it’s your life and the end is unwritten, it can be easy to lose heart. It can be easy to question and doubt God. It can be easy to think He’s forgotten you.
But Joseph isn’t the only person whose life looked like this. I was reading in Galatians and I noticed that when Paul was called by God to believe in Jesus and preach the gospel, his life didn’t head immediately in that direction. Galatians 1:17-18 says,
“I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem …”
When I read that, it caught my attention that Paul acknowledged he didn’t go where it would be expected of him to go. Rather he went AWAY from it. Also, the route from Arabia to Damascus goes AROUND Jerusalem. And on top of all of that, He then WAITED three more years to FINALLY go to Jerusalem. If I’m honest, I think life can feel like that – we think we know what God wants for us, but circumstances take us everywhere BUT there. And then we wait…we wait a long time. It can feel like we must have messed up or didn’t hear God right or He doesn’t actually have a good future for us. But, God doesn’t lie (Hebrews 6:18, Titus 1:2)….so it must be something else.
I’ve recently been realizing and accepting that God is a big and sovereign God so He has a big and sovereign will. I don’t think the idea that God’s will for your life is a narrow straight line is accurate – at least not anymore, because I definitely used to. I always thought that if you pray and obey Him, though life won’t be perfect, it’ll continue moving forward in alignment with His good plans for you in a way that will be evident. What I’m starting to understand is that from a human perspective, there’s a lot of twists and turns and even circumstances that seem like you’ve fallen back so far it’s impossible to ever get to what God has for you. But, in God’s eye’s, those who love Him are perfectly where they are meant to be and He’s constantly at work in the unseen for our good. I think those weave together – life’s negative, confusing circumstances and God’s working – so that we really are always moving forward WITH Him, even if it looks like we couldn’t be further away, because, hey, faith is confidence in things unseen (Hebrews 11:1). And I’ve been practicing really resting in that and trusting Him that I’m not forgotten and I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.
amelia catherine 