Working Together

© 2006 VisitSormland, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

In my family, we've been working on some things lately. I've been working on the details of a new mortgage for the new house we plan to move into next week. My wife has been working on getting boxes and getting things packed up for the move. My son is working on fundraising for a missions trip he's going on this summer (and, by the way, if you would like to make a tax-deductible gift toward that, let me know!) The other day I was thinking about the balance of our own effort and God's provision, and a couple of things came to me.

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

- Romans 8:28 ESV

Did you notice that word "together"? Who is working together in this verse? Strangely enough, notice that strictly speaking, it is not God that is "working together"! The things are working together. Maybe that's splitting hairs a bit, because God is certainly behind the whole deal, but to the casual observer, it looks like things are just coming together for this person who is pursuing God's purpose. I think this verse also implies that the person who loves God is working toward a goal, and that the circumstances (some of which may be negative) are ultimately working together with the person to make things turn out all right.

The heart of man plans his way,
   but the LORD establishes his steps.

-Proverbs 16:9 ESV

I think God expects us to think through problems. I think He expects us to make plans and put them into motion. When we do that, though, He ultimately is the one that makes things happen. He is the one that makes things work together for our Good. He is the one who establishes each step that we take.

Seek the Holy Spirit's guidance! Make wise plans! And then put them into action, knowing that even if something seems to go weird on you, God is guiding each step and making even that unforeseen situation work for your good. Then when all of those things come together and make something wonderful happen, don't forget to tell people about it! That's your chance to give God the glory!

All Idea, No Time!

I sometimes use a service called Evernote. Evernote is kind of like a place to store things that are in your brain but you're afraid they might fall out; if you can imagine a folder on your computer containing as many documents as you could possibly want, all indexed and searchable and at your fingertips from any computer (or your cell phone, or whatever), that's Evernote. In Evernote, I have a folder full of ideas for this blog. There are easily the seeds of 20 blog entries in there! Why are they in Evernote and not on this blog? There are a lot of answers to that question, but I'll give you just one right now.

Yesterday I left work at 5pm, stopped briefly at home to pick up my 10-year-old son, and then went straight to church, put on a dress, and sat in the dark talking to little kids. Well... OK, that's not exactly the WHOLE story. My church is having Vacation Bible School this week, and my wife and I are volunteering to work with the kids. The VBS is Egypt-themed (you can see some of the setup in my photo set from the setup day) Last night I spent most of the time playing Joseph in jail. The kids came in with their "Egyptian families" (other children, and some adult volunteers) and I, as Joseph, told them the story of my life, starting with "Back in Canaan where I used to live, I have eleven brothers..." and ending with "One of the prisoners had a strange dream, and I told him it meant he would get out of prison, and I asked him to mention me to Pharaoh, but I think he forgot about me!" I'm not sure I was the most convincing or articulate Joseph in the history of theater, but the children seemed to respond well to what was going on, and I never completely lost my place, so that was good!

When they asked me if I would "be Joseph" the first night of VBS (they have another volunteer for the other nights), I said, "Sure!" I always like to help out where I can. But when I started digging into the script, I started to realize how much of an impact it could have on a child if he was experiencing something that was confusing or scary or difficult for him or her. I particularly wanted to make sure I cleraly communicated the message in this one paragraph near the end of the night's lines for Joseph, who had been demonstrating throughout his story that even if you cover a light with a basket, the light is still shining:

"I've had hard times, times I didn't know what would happen next. But I do know that no matter what, God gives us hope. Even when things seem sad or scary or hard, He's still with us. It's kind of like these lights that shine in the dark. Just like the light, God is always there - in dark or hard times, and in good times."

Wow.

Children remember VBS. Children give their lives to Christ at VBS. I hope I did a good enough job last night that today, something I said comes back to the memory of a little boy or little girl, and helps him or her react with Godly wisdom to a situation that they would ordinarily react to in a different way. That would make it worth every second of the time I spent working on memorizing that script!

So anyway, that's why I wasn't blogging last night. There are other reasons I don't blog other nights... one night I got down the Candy Land game and played it with my 2-year-old girl. Another night I played some Super Monkey Ball with the 10-year-old. Sunday evening I was eating Taco Salad across from the beautiful lady who, for some reason, many years ago agreed to become my wife. Tonight I won't be blogging; I'll be at church. VBS starts back up Thursday and ends Friday. On Saturday I'll be... but you get the idea.

I guess I'm a busy guy. The Word says that if you are busy with the things of God, though, that's a good thing! As long as you rest when appropriate and don't burn yourself out, a busy life is God's gift to us.

But it doesn't leave much time for translating those vague thoughts in Evernote into coherent blog entries. Some of them will probably never be blog entries, because at this point I've forgotten what they were supposed to mean! But I pray that the ones that matter eventually make it out of my heart and onto your screen and take you somewhere with God that you wouldn't have gone otherwise.

That said... new blog entry tomorrow. Stay tuned! :)

Dropping the Ball

I'm reading Dr. James Dobson's new book, Bringing Up Girls (review coming soon, by the way) about parenting, and as designed, it has me thinking about my own job as a parent, not only of my daughter but also of my son. I was thinking this morning about some of the things he needs to understand that I've learned in my lifetime. I want to pass on those nuggets of wisdom to him so that he doesn't have to spend 20 or 30 or 40 years trying to figure them out. I thought, if only my own father had taught me some of those things better, he might have been able to help me out that way when I was a kid. And the fact is, he did teach me a lot of things he had to learn the hard way himself. I am quite grateful for the things that he managed to get through my thick skull and help me incorporate into my life. Passing on wisdom from generation to generation is critical; just ask King David, who many believe passed on the wisdom found in the book of Proverbs to Solomon, who later codified it in the book we have today.

But then I started thinking. The human race has been around an awfully long time, and there have been many, many very wise men and women in the world. Surely some of them were my great grandparents, or great great grandparents, or somewhere up the line. Somebody, sometime that I am descended from knew the things that I need to know. Why didn't they pass them down to me? Why didn't that knowledge filter on through the years until it rested in my lap, like a priceless gift from a stranger who seems vaguely familiar?

Well, it could be that the person who knew those things died before getting a chance to pass them on. That sometimes happens. It could be that there was a divorce, and a child never had the parent with that information as part of his life. Different children have different needs; maybe the parent who knew that nugget of information that I desperately need to know, simply never had a child who needed to know it. Maybe the child was just too hard-headed to listen to wisdom. There's an example of that, too, in the life of King Solomon; his son Rehoboam clearly had no grasp on the wisdom of his father, and instead of listening to wise counsel from older men, followed the advice of his idiot friends, and it cost him his kingdom (here, see for yourself in 1 Kings chapter 12). It happens to the best of us; there are any number of plausible reasons that knowledge might go to the grave with a parent and never be passed on to the child.

There is one reason, though, that haunts me a bit. I wonder if someone, somewhere in my ancestry, simply dropped the ball. Maybe they got busy with career, hobbies, social activities, politics, or whatever, and neglected to pass on critical information from parent to child, maybe even critical information that could save the child a lifetime of heartache. Maybe that child never learned what he or she needed to know, and thus was unable to pass it on to the next generation and the next. It could be that I have somehow managed to figure out something that some ancestor of mine hundreds of years ago knew, as plain as the nose on his face, but nobody else in my family has managed to get a grip on since then. As a parent myself, I have a responsibility, a duty to carry out, and that duty is to not be the weak link in the chain. If I can be a person who succeeds in passing on any and everything useful I have learned about how to be a successful human being to my children, then I will have gone a long way toward having been a successful parent. There is more to parenting than passing on information, of course, and given the choice between being a loving parent who passed on no wisdom and being a wise parent who did not love, I would go with being a loving parent and never look back. But if I can succeed in being both a loving father and a wise father, and pass both of those traits on to my children, then one day I will be able to face my maker with my children like trophies beside me and hopefully hear the two golden words that each of us hopes to hear from Him: "Well done."