There is a task that needs to be accomplished, or
a goal that needs to be met. You believe it’s part of God’s plan. It’s part of
His calling on your life. And yet, the goal seems just out of reach. You do
everything you know to do, and you just can’t seem to get there. Been there,
done that.
Whose responsibility is it to accomplish the things that God calls
me to do? His or mine?
I’d like to illustrate this problem with a recent event in
our lives. We are missionaries with Global Partners. We have been assigned to Belgium, where
Phil is working on his PhD. When we’re given an assignment, we’re also given a
certain amount of time to build a team of people who will support us, both
prayerfully and financially. During this period of time, we ask people to make
“faith promises,” meaning they promise to give a certain amount of money over a
certain amount of time in order to cover our projected expenses while we’re on
the field. After being in Belgium for four years, we had to come back to the U.S. to “re-fill the coffers,” as
some of our support had dropped off. We had been working toward this goal for
about a year, and we had less than three months before we were supposed to go
back to Belgium.
We were still significantly under our target. We were running out of prospects,
and, honestly, we were simply tired of asking and we were getting discouraged.
I started wondering if I was working too hard and not praying enough. But
sitting around praying and waiting for God to do something seemed somehow
presumptuous. We had a plan. We were supposed to work the plan. There were more
phone calls that could be made; more emails that could be written. We had not
completely exhausted all possibilities yet. When people would ask about it, I’d
say things like, “Where God leads, He provides.” I believe that, but at the
same time I was still thinking about what else I should be doing, at times even
questioning parts of our calling that we thought were clear.
I told Phil one day that I feel like we have to walk a fine line
between work and presumption. On one side, we work too hard and don’t trust
God, trying to accomplish everything in our own strength, and on the other side
we sit back and expect God to do it all. Phil corrected my thinking – he said
it’s more like a continuum. At one end is us working it all out ourselves, and
at the other end is the presumption that God will do everything. Where we live
is somewhere between work and presumption. There will always be a tension, but
it’s not like an either/or situation, and we don’t have to have perfect
balance. Do what is at hand to do, and trust God for the rest. Have I mentioned that my husband is pretty smart?
There is an ending to this story. Well, sort of, because the
journey continues. While we were spinning our wheels, worrying about where we
were going to find more support, God was working. I kept saying that the money
would come from somewhere we didn’t expect. Phil kept saying that maybe we
weren’t finding more money because we didn’t need more money. That didn’t make
sense to me, because we had trimmed our budget as much as possible, and still
didn’t have enough. In the end, we were both right. Seemingly out of the blue, Phil was offered a
scholarship that allowed us to reduce our budget significantly. We still have a
little bit of work to do, but it seems God did most of it on our behalf. Where
God leads, He provides. “Unexpected” really does mean we can't predict what He’s going to do.
“The one who calls you is faithful, and He will do it.” – I
Thessalonians 5:24
