4:00 am. I see this a lot lately. I wake from a dead sleep, check my phone, and there it is. 4:00 am. I can’t complain or grumble because seeing 4:00 am is an answer to prayer. As often happens, the answers to our prayers are not always what we plan out for God to do.
A while back, I was feeling like there just wasn’t enough time in the day to get everything done and spend quality time with God and my family. So I asked God to give me time. I pictured my children becoming good little housekeepers, so I would spend less time cleaning. I pictured the weeds in my garden (and there are plenty!) dying off, so that I would neither have to spend time working in my yard, nor feel guilty for not spending time working in my yard. I may have even pictured coming home from work and finding my yard and house all in order due to supernatural intervention. Hey... I believe God still does miracles. Why not one where angels come and do my laundry, clean my floors, and fix the leaky window in my basement?
Instead, God has started waking me at 4 a.m.
This past Monday morning, when my 4 a.m. heavenly wake up call took place, I woke with a sense of expectation. I had one of those moments when you know that someone needs prayer and needs it now. So I prayed. And I prayed. And I prayed. Eventually, the restraints of time took over and I hauled myself out of bed to start my day. While at work, I waited for God to reveal what event took place that morning that required prayer. I faithfully checked my email, my Facebook, and waited for my phone to ring. Nothing. So I headed home, kept my cell close by, and waited. Nada. That evening, I put the kids to bed, crawled under my own covers, checked my email and Facebook one last time and...nichts (german for “ain’t nothing there”).
This got me thinking about how “results motivated” I am. I’ll be honest, I like results. I like cleaning up and seeing everything in its place. I like seeing all the paperwork on my desk at work done and filed. I even like seeing the nasty brown water going down the drown after giving the kids showers because they decided to dig in the compost pile to find rhinoceros beetles. I like to know what I did was “worth it”. And don’t even get me started on suffering! If I’m going to suffer, it had better be worth it!!! You know what I mean. I’m the type of person who “suffers” at the gym for an hour, fully expecting that hour to result in some serious physical transformation. When that doesn’t happen, I am much less motivated to do it again. I like results in every part of my life!
How does this affect my spiritual life, though? Can spirituality be results oriented? The majority of people pray to some form or another of a god. We ask for healing, money, safety, and help finding the car keys. We ask for patience (big mistake, by the way), wisdom, and time (also a big mistake if you rather not see 4 a.m.). We ask, not because we just want to let God know what we are thinking about, but because we want results. But how often do we get what we want? Let’s be honest; not often. So, for those of us who persist in praying and crying out to God even when we don’t get the results we want, what gives?
As with all things, we need to go back to Scripture. The good ol' B-I-B-L-E. It is very “cool” in the modern-day church to have a “life verse”. At small group gatherings, we get our “holy” on and share our life verse, reflecting the cosmic love we feel from God. Being a less than smooshy christian, I was never very good at this. When I was asked what my life verse was during a young mother's group, I responded:
Job 38 (NLT)
1 Then the Lord answered Job from the whirlwind:
2 “Who is this that questions my wisdom
with such ignorant words?
3 Brace yourself like a man,
because I have some questions for you,
and you must answer them.
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Tell me, if you know so much.
The response was priceless! Silence and big round eyes followed by a giggle, and, “Who’s next.”
I get it. It’s not the most lovely of verses but it gives me the right perspective every time. Who do I think I am? Who am I to demand results? Where was I when He was creating every atom, every molecule? Who am I to whine that “nobody tells me anything”, like a twelve year old girl? The truth is, we have no right but to praise God for using us, whether we see the results or not.
Job is the ultimate example. Here is this incredible dude, loving God and reaping the blessings, and along comes Satan. Satan can’t stand to see Job living a blessed life and declares that Job wouldn’t keep on loving God if God allowed him to lose all of his blessings. God gives Satan the old “Oh yeah?” and tells Satan to do his worst but not to kill him. So Satan kills off Job’s kids, takes away his livelihood, covers him in the worst case of boils ever, allows his nagging wife to live, and makes him the laughing stock of the neighborhood. Now Job is human. He gets mad, sad, and he feels miserable. However, regardless of all that has happened, he continues to trust God. When his wife and friends berate him, he refuses to curse God. He trusts that God has a plan. Later in the story, we learn that God blesses Job with more children and wealth but, I think we can all agree, that the pain of loss never goes away even if you learn to move on. Job still carried the scars of his experience.
The thing that really hits home for me with this story is this; Job suffered, not solely for his own benefit, but for ours. Its through his example, that many christians have learned to cling to their faith when others would have walked away. During his natural life, he would have never known the impact of his suffering and the blessing it would be to millions of jews and christians to come. When our family was going through an incredibly hard time, I spent a lot of time in the four verses above. I was so angry and I wanted to know why I was suffering. God spoke to me over and over in the book of Job. He showed me that sometimes we don’t get to know the why. And sometimes we suffer, not so we can be blessed, but so that others can know God more fully.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Waking up at 4 a.m. is not suffering! Getting to spend my morning uninterrupted in the presence of my God is nothing but a blessing! I say all of this because I am learning that I am a tool to be used by God, not always the product at that moment. Just like a nail that is hammered when using it to build a house does not know the blessings of the home it built.
Another brief analogy, I hunt rabbits with beagles. While it is no cake-walk for me, the dogs take the brunt of the difficulty. They often come home with bloodied tales from briers, thorns here and there, and exhausted from hunting out and chasing those elusive little rodents*. Why do the dogs do this? Because they were made by God to do this. They were made to be a tool so that I might feed my family. And even though they rarely get to enjoy grilled rabbit wrapped in bacon (so stinkin’ good!), they keep running because they truly love the hunt. They are satisfied with the process even if they don’t see the results. At least for us, we know that we will see the big picture someday when we spend eternity with God.
So what are we doing today? Are we enjoying being the tool that God is using today or are we sitting in the woods waiting for a rabbit to drop dead at our feet? I challenge us all to learn to love the chase. I say we learn to love being God’s tool, even when it feels like He’s beating on us just like a nail and we have no idea what the heck He’s trying to build. Do this because we know, just as Job did, that He has a plan and we are part of it.
*I am aware that rabbits are not actually rodents but within the order of Lagomorpha and the family of leporidae. In our family, the cute ones we keep as pets are bunnies, the delicious ones harvested from nature are rabbits.
