Leaning on our own understanding can cause major stumbles in our lives! It hinders our growth with Christ, causes heartache and often leads us down unintended rabbit trails. Many years ago God showed me a picture of what it looks like to him when we lean on our own understanding.
I was walking down a long dusty narrow road leaning on a cane, when suddenly the cane was kicked out from under me and I fell flat on my face.
Has that ever happened to you? In an instant everything you have worked toward changes direction because it wasn’t what God had intended for you at all? I have had mud on my face more times than I care to recount from leaning on my cane of understanding! But the good news is that as soon as I could stand back up, Gods picture was much greater than what I could have ever imagined.
I had a client tell me days before one of these falls, “I see you launching a little toy boat into the ocean and what returns to you is an ocean liner.” That’s when I should have realized, “Uh oh, God is about to take something I have been grasping too tightly.”
God’s picture involves every grain of sand on the beach. He only gives each one of us a few grains at a time to hold. I’m quite sure this is because if he showed us the big picture up front, most of us would just pull the covers over our heads, get buried in the sand, and not move at all.
Praise God, he knows how he made us! What we need to understand is that all the analyzing, intellectualizing, rationalizing, and dissecting the current circumstance in order to figure it out, opens the door to a spirit of striving. Striving in turn invites a hyperactive spirit that doesn’t allow your mind to shut off. Between these two you end up feeling like a hamster on a wheel, with no end in sight.
These are the strategies of your spiritual enemies to discourage you when the direction changes.
Honestly, what sustained me through college was the promise of a marketing job at Busch Gardens. However, the director who I had interned with moved to California days before I graduated to work at Disney Land and the job disappeared.
In another season, I entered the Master’s Degree in Christian Counseling program with the NCCA to get my degree so I could, in my mind, counsel at my church. Days before I was to graduate, however, the direction changed. I heard God say “Go, I am releasing you to soar!” It sounded good, but it hurt like the dickens until I got back up and started walking again.
God’s plan all along was leading me to help launch Above & Beyond Counseling Ministries where the name group sessions would be called “Released to Soar Deliverance Seminar”s. Bottom line: we won’t have all the answers until we see him face to face. The road is narrow; the canes get you going, but don’t lean too hard on that current view of your understanding! Gods owns the whole beach and his promise for you is bigger than what you could ever imagine.
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