At the Center of It All

I really hate it when God doesn’t fit into the nice, neat, little box I’ve prepared for Him. I mean, my life would be so much simpler if I could just get it all figured out and then just go on with my day. But, no. God has to keep coming in and adjusting the size and shape of the box, or rearranging the contents, and making me come back in and make sense of it all over again.

He did it again on Sunday.

I had been thinking and writing a little about the idea of contentment: knowing that what God has given me is sufficient for my needs, and knowing that even if I never got another thing for the rest of my life, it would be OK. I was just getting to the point where I believed (even if I didn’t really feel it yet) that I really could be content with what I had, when God came out of left field and spun me in the other direction.

Sunday morning, our pastor was speaking from Psalm 118, sharing some thoughts with us about God being in control of our lives and on becoming confident in God’s ability to manage our lives and our situations. As soon as he hit verse 25, my head began to spin:

O Lord, save us; O Lord, grant us success. (Psalms 118:25, NIV)

Pastor Del explained the verse this way:

Don’t live with a poverty mindset! Ask for more than enough. God is a God of abundance. When you ask for just enough to get by, you’re really not asking for anything. You’re just hoping circumstances get a little better. That’s not faith; that’s acquiescence.

So how can I be content with just enough but be able to humbly pray for more than enough? It rattled me. I couldn’t process it all. It made no sense. God wants to give me more than I can think of, but I should be content with whatever I have.

I haven’t yet come up with an answer—I still can’t reconcile the two points of view into a coherent way of living and thinking. It’s interesting…often just the process of sitting down to write about something like this helps me sort through things and make sense of it, but this time it didn’t work. Yet. I’m sure I’ll be coming back and spending some more time on this one.