Stuff I’ve learned (Raquel)
July 2, 2009 by sharppointythings
I was telling a friend that it seemed like I’d learned stuff over the past few years of my life, but it was hard to tell it to anyone because it just seemed trite and obvious when I tried to put it into words. On further reflection, everything I’ve learned is still true, even if everyone’s heard it before. So, hey, maybe I could a blog post out of it anyway. In no particular order:
Sometimes it feels like God brought you this far, but then just ditched you, or maybe forgot about you. It’s not true. Both halves of this matter. Of course it’s not true–but it still really feels like that sometimes. On the other hand, after Jesus came to earth, with all the humilition and hurt that implies, died a slow and painful death for your sins, brought you through all the pain so far, slowly making you more like Him and teach you more about Him, did He really just leave you behind now? No. Just no.
It’s not about what you feel like, it’s about obeying anyway. It feels like I have always known that my emotions are not supposed to be the basis for my life. What God says is far more reliable than what I feel like at a given moment. But somehow, for a lot of my life, I expected that to mean that I would ‘feel’ a drive to obey and love God whether I felt like it or not. Some Sunday mornings it ‘feels’ like I’m failing to worship properly because I’m distracted and don’t ‘feel’ worshipful like I’m supposed to. So I try to pull my attention back to the service when I notice its wandering, and settle for knowing that every word of praise I’m singing is true, whether I’m ‘feeling’ it at the moment or not.
Trying really hard isn’t good enough. Only God can change your heart. This is lifted straight from a sermon Pastor B preached while he was visiting a couple years ago, but I think that still counts as having learned it. 
This is where I start to get lost in my own words, because everything I said about doing your best to obey when it doesn’t feel like it’s working is still true. But it’s also true that really, it’s not working, it’s not going to, and you just have to wait patiently while God slowly makes you more like Jesus. While you’re doing your best to obey. At this point I decide: Life is mysterious. Deal with it.
Yes, God really does know better than you do. Yeah, all those great plans I had for getting married at eighteen and being the world’s greatest farmwife/homemaker/homeschool-mom? I would have failed horribly, been miserable, and probably made everyone around me miserable. Spending the last five years getting the above three points drilled into my head was much better than the way I wanted my life to go. Still working on embracing the fact that this presumably means that God knows better about my life right now, and therefore my current life is better all around than the way *I* want it to go.
So, there. Yay for me, I learned all the obvious things I thought I knew already. Well, probably not *all* of them yet.
Oh, and also don’t open van doors when there are fragile things on the other side that might have shifted while you were driving and be ready to fall out. That’s an important one too…
Thanks for writing out these “obvious” thoughts, Raquel. I needed to be reminded of these things- especially the first one. It’s so great to see what God has been doing in your life. I’m looking forward to perhaps reading another list like this in a few years. What other obvious things will you have relearned by then?
Oh, and another obvious truth that I apparently needed ingrained in me is no matter how full your hands are, never put a cake on the floor where a child can step on it.
[...] don’t feel like doing this but I’m peaceful about it’. Refer back to point two of Stuff I’ve Learned. Peace shouldn’t sound like an emotion to us, but it does. I don’t mean ‘I feel [...]
It’s great to see what God is teaching you! However, I take issue with something you said in point 4. I am NOT disputing the point. God really does know better than you or I do. However, when you said that you would have failed miserably, etc had your plans for being married at eighteen and being the world’s greatest farmwife/homemaker/homeschool-mom – well…that may or may not be true. We have no way of knowing. In fact, you may have turned out to be the greatest. But, a scripture shows us again and again (Example: David, Moses, etc, etc), God doesn’t always choose the most obvious person. Natural talent has nothing to with His plans for us. To say you would have failed miserably is rationalizing your present state of singleness and trying to conform God’s ways to our logical way of thinking.
You’re learning some pretty deep things here that people three times your(chronological and spiritual) age have yet to ever contemplate. Know you’ll have to revisit these lessons over and over again, whether single, married, parent, childless – not because you didn’t learn them the first time, but because they need to be planted more deeply in your heart.
XXOO