| | Yesterday marked the 33rd anniversary of my arrival here on Planet Earth. It was a low-key affair, celebrated mostly by a deluge of birthday wishes on my Facebook wall and email inbox. At the end of the day, however, I experienced a gentle reminder from God about how, no matter what our circumstances are, we all share some of the same fears.
Last night, Nikki and I met a few dear friends down in Virginia to see Dave Barnes perform for about the seventh or eighth time since I blogged about his goodness again and again last year. After the show (which was as great as ever), everybody took off, but Nikki and I decided to stick around and say hey to Dave when he came out from backstage. What we didn't expect, however, was for Dave to make a bee-line for us when there were plenty of other people waiting to meet him. We also didn't expect for him to occasionally pause his conversation with us to hang out and take pictures with the other folks who were waiting there. Most of all, we didn't expect him to want to keep talking to us when everybody else had left.
And what I learned from our conversation is that we all wonder if we're doing what God wants us to be doing. We all of us have the tendency to walk through doors that God has opened for us, and immediately start second-guessing whether we made the right choice. Even when God is clearly in the middle of our both the decision-making process and the decision itself, we still will most likely run into the issue of unmet expectations. We have an idea in our minds that when I make decision (a), God will immediately bless it by doing (b), (c), (d) and (e). And when it doesn't come immediately, we start to wonder if it will come at all. Questions start filling our minds, and things start to feel a little murky.
Whether it's a job offer, a business deal, a marriage proposal, or whatever it may be, we walk through all of our decisions with certain expectations. More often than not, those expectations aren't met, or else the meeting of expectations comes in a different way or in a different package than we were looking for. And it seems to get harder as we get older, and we start to wonder if life will ever work quite like we expected it to. But, when our courage is a little stronger, we keep taking those tentative steps along the journey, and pray for just enough light to not fall off the path.
Hopefully, Dave was encouraged by our conversation as much as we were. Because that conversation was why yesterday was one of my best birthdays yet. And it didn't even have anything to do with my birthday... |
| | Posted 9/4/2008 7:59 AM - 58 Views - 4 eProps - 2 comments
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