Plot points and Plans

Years ago...and at this point I do mean years, I was in the Science Olympics in my school...Don't get too excited, lots of people were in the science Olympics one of the ways to get in was to make a hot box that was supposed to keep water hot for a certain amount of time, build a contraption that kept an egg from breaking and some other strange stuff.  I happened to build a hot box that did a fairly decent job and in doing so landed a spot on the team.  The good thing was that it was a day out of school, if i remember correctly the bus ride for that particular science Olympics led to my first high school Girl Friend, at least I think it did, anyway the point is that you couldn't just do one thing at the Science Olympics back in the day Mrs. Viars wanted to optimize bus space.  So in addition to my hot box project I had to choose another event to be in.  There were options to do a weather event and a few others an then there was the option to do a compass course. I'm sure there is a more scientific name to whatever that was, but that's the best I can do given the circumstances.  I chose the compass course and my buddy Jeff did the weather thing.  I then spent an entire Saturday with a the commander of my Royal Ranger outpost (think boy scouts but attached to the church I grew up in) following direction a set of directions he had plotted out for me to find.  North South East West.. North East, South East etc.  I successfully navigated the courses he set up for me to navigate, filling in the paper with what I needed to and all was good.  I went to the competition confident that I had learned all that I needed to learn to make it through the course.

A little thing about compass navigation, especially when it is in competition form...yeah we didn't do north south east and west... we were each handed a compass that was set in the middle of a clear plastic ruler for lack of a better word, with markings on it the compass I had was a small circle with a flip top lid...the compass we used looked like this...

BIG DIFFERENCE...Now to be fair to Commander Cliff (no I'm not making that up that was his name, dude was TALL to)  this is the kind of compass he trained me to use, however he trained me N, S, E, W.  He did not train me 360 degrees bla bla bla.   To say I was lost would be an understatement.  I will admit to hoping we would all get to start around the same time and I could sort of fudge my way through.  Nope.  Start times were staggered, and while we all ended up bunching up there was a problem in that I really had no idea what I was doing.  I had the tools I needed but I had no idea how to use them.

Which brings me to the real reason for this blog post.  I have been out of ministry for 8 months now.  Back when I left I will admit to being pretty angry and that anger had several places to stop.  God, the church, the conference, and of course myself, because lets face it I had failed.  I made some pretty hard and fast statements as well.  It's funny how when we are in a place of pain, feeling like we have failed ourselves, God, our family and the group of people we are supposed to be helping we lash out.  I would love to tell you that I will never lash out again.  I would love to say that suddenly everything is sunshine and roses but if I am honest that's not how it is.  If we are all willing to be honest we will admit that there are days that we get it and days that we don't.  What matters is what we do on the days in-between.  See the days that we get it and that everything is right in our world and it's all working, we lean into the good stuff, we tell everyone how blessed we are, our social media posts are sickening to the vast majority of our friends, and we can't wait to get to whatever place of worship that we go to, so that everyone can see how great life is.  The days when everything is bad when things fall apart when we are lost and don't know what's next, we get angry, we are no longer blessed God is not real, or not interested, we find the most depressing music we can, and everyone tends to know how bad life is and how much we hate it and how much we are not being treated the way we should be.  We avoid getting together with other people to worship because we don't really want to or see a need too.

Full disclosure I was there for a long time.  I would make excuses to skip church  and when I did go to church it was usually just because that's what the family wanted.  Eye contact was at a minimum, angry rants abounded.  It's a small blessing that I stopped blogging, because while writing is my way of processing and I love doing it, what would have come out of my fingers to the screen would have been ugly and hurtful and would not have been even close to the way Jesus would respond.  Slowly things started to change, we found a church that we fit into, and we began to get involved.  I went back to Facebook and started to actually look at what people posted while I was going through the dark time and found so many people that I thought were gone from my life reaching out and praying and saying to call them.

I have had, for a while now, a hard time holding onto the whole road map of life that God drew for me individually.  I believe that God is interested in me, I believe God cares, I believe God has a plan and a purpose for humanity and even for me.  I believe that plan is to be a pastor, however I also believe that there are entire aspects of that calling and the fulfillment of that calling that sit squarely in my lap.  I'm not much for signs and all that.  People will point to Gideon and the whole fleece thing as if it's a good thing. I tend to see that whole thing not as a guidebook to be sure of what God wants and more of a this is not the way it should be done.   God did what he had to do for Gideon because Gideon didn't want to listen didn't want to step up didn't want to do the task that was before him, he set out impossible tasks not to test God but to get out of his job, the job that God had decided Gideon was supposed to do.  It makes me laugh was I read the entire account of Gideon, mainly because part of me thinks that God engages in similar behavior with the whole whittling down of Gideon's army.  I know that we have this great picture of Gideon having a come to Yahweh moment but I really don't think he was cool with losing vast chunks of his army, especially when it was that whole pick them on the way they drink thing.   God wanted to be sure there was no mistaking who was doing the saving sure, but Gideon still had to do his part, he still had to be the leader, he still had to follow the path that God laid out.

Looking back on the last eight months and even further back at the last five years I can see the shape of a path emerging, and while there are places that a road sign popped up to help steer the journey there are huge chunks of the journey that are me making choices after talking to my family and friends and yes God.  

As we stand on the edge of something new, I am beginning to see the pattern of how God has to deal with me to get me where I am supposed to be.  I plot the points but God makes the plan, and there are many times that I'm right back on that compass course with all the tools I need and not a clue how to chart the course, and then God steps in and hands me a revised plan with N S E and W instead of Degrees and Coordinates, smiles pats me on the head and says.  Now try it.   That's what is happening now and I can't wait to share the end results.