Skip to main content

When You Know the Answer Before You Ask the Question

Have you ever taken your cues from Gideon and come up short? Gideon was a little freaked out when God told him to lead the Israelites into battle. He didn't exactly relish the idea of going into battle without being absolutely positive that God was with him. So He gave God a couple of tests. Day one: he lay a wool fleece on his threshing floor and told God that if He really wanted him to do this thing then have the dew fall on the fleece alone. In the morning, he had to wring out the fleece because it was sodden with dew, but the ground around it was dry. Day two: he told God that if He really wanted him to do this then do the opposite the next morning - let the fleece alone be dry but the ground around it wet. It happened just as Gideon requested. God was pretty obvious in what He wanted Gideon to do.

My turn: I have an idea for a project. It promises to be fairly time-consuming and likely emotionally taxing. Like Gideon, I don't relish the idea of doing this if God isn't with me. So I want to know: is it my idea or is it God's? I want to hear from God on this. I had just read about Gideon, so I decided to set a "fleece" before God. What happened? Nada. Zilcho. Silencio.

According to Gideon's story, that means I should drop the subject and move on. The thing is, I can't stop thinking about it - I've been mulling it over for months. I can't turn it off at a moment's notice, although I wish I could. I told my husband last night that I had wanted God to make it super-duper obvious. His profound answer? "and how often does He do that?"

Oh. Good point.

As I continued to make dinner and go about my evening routine, I continued to ruminate. I'd thought that it was God who gave me the whole fleece idea thing. I think this project I'm considering is God's idea. So why wouldn't He answer my "fleece?" It wasn't until I lie snuggled into bed last night that it hit me . . . and this is as equally profound as my husband's statement . . . Are you ready for this? Here's the lightening bolt moment: sometimes I'm wrong. Sometimes I just miss it. God didn't mess up here. I did. I tried to manipulate Him, and He just doesn't work like that.

The thing is that I'm afraid of embarking on this project because it's outside my comfort zone. I'd like to drop the subject from my daily thought menu, but it's always there. I'm beginning to think that perhaps God is making it obvious, just not the way I wanted Him to do it. Sometimes when we know someone well, they don't answer our questions directly - like when I ask my husband of nearly twenty-nine years if he'd rather have nachos or steak for dinner and he just looks at me with that "what do you think?" expression because really, I knew His answer before I even asked the question.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

As A Child

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 18:3 Become like little children? Really? Children are definitely cute and innocent, but that pretty much covers the positive qualities. On the negative side, however, the list is quite a bit lengthier: demanding, dependent, self-centered, messy, often smelly, expensive, and embarrassingly honest. So why? WHY in the world would Jesus tell us to become like little children? WHY in the world would He want that? What was He thinking?! Well, He was a thirty-something year-old bachelor. Maybe He didn't really know what He was talking about when He said that. I mean, if we come to Him like little children, it's pretty much guaranteed to be messy. We're likely to be crabby, cranky. We might be downright angry. Prayer-ADD is hard to control on a good day. If we're not on top of it, if we don't have our list in front of us to focus our thoughts, we...
4 comments
Read more

The Hug That Said It All

I witnessed a hug the other day. Big deal, right? People see other people hug all the time. Yeah, but this was a hug that melted my heart. We attended a graduation party in honor of our nephew. It was held under a pavilion. There was quite a spread of food, and each table was loaded with decorations and favors (very nicely done, Ange!). Obviously a lot of work . . . a lot of love was poured into this party. As the evening wound down, many of us hung around to help clean up. That's the un-fun part of a party. The un-fun part of this party became even more un-fun when, in an attempt to dump a drum of trash into a plastic trash bag, wet, gooey, smelley garbage ended up on the concrete floor of the pavilion. It was rank and disgusting, but my sister-in-law (the afore mentioned "Ange.") cleaned up without complaint. When the graduate meandered by shortly thereafter, I jokingly told him, in a scolding voice, that he had better get down on his knees in gratitude for all his moth...
3 comments
Read more

Believing the Lies

My husband and I recently watched The Help - a story about a group of African American women who worked as maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the '60s. One of the protagonists works for a woman "who got no b'ness havin' babies." This woman, this family maid and nanny, tells her little two year old ward regularly, "You is pretty. You is smart. You is impor'ant." How difficult it is for us to believe that about ourselves - really, to believe anything good about ourselves. I always try to be my raw self when I write a blog post. Today is no exception. So I confess that I've been drowning in a storm of lies lately. My head knows they're lies, and I could easily tell anyone else in the same place that they're lies, but I haven't been able to get a grip. There have been so many of them coming at me at once. It seems that I just break the surface, gulp some fresh air of truth then get pulled back under. One thing I know: the enemy of our ...
7 comments
Read more