For those who have been following along for a bit, you know that we have packed our house in Portland and are moving to the Houston area of Texas. The process began in the first quarter of last year, but the past ten months have consisted of her making a bunch of declarative statements about what is and is not going to happen in this moving process . . . and I basically shot all of her ideas down over and over again. She stuck to her guns, and as things have moved forward, so far she has had most everything she has been steadfastly declaring pan out the way she has been praying for it to. While I don’t normally look to her for lessons on how to engage faith, I have to say that I have learned a lot from her in the past few months.
I am somewhat Type A, and I don’t like messy change with a bunch of moving parts. I like to administrate problems out of the equation instead of fly by the seat of my pants and make decisions as things come up. Sunshine prefers it the opposite way, which is a struggle for me at times, but this time around I think the lesson has been more about purposefully engaging faith and trusting God to walk us through each step of the process. I once heard someone say that the Bible says “Your word is a lamp unto my feet”, not a 100-yard spotlight down the road, and the lesson applies here.
In this process I have become more acutely aware of how my own fears were playing into my unbelief and even discouraging her in the process. There are times to make decisions out of human wisdom, but there is a difference between being wise and being afraid. If we operate out of fear, we will think that something is wise because it is less risky or causes less fear even if it isn’t the best choice for us. However, when we aren’t operating out of fear we can be free to choose to do something in faith *or* we can choose to do something that we consider wise based on true wisdom instead of being guided by fear.
I’m still not 100% at rest with this move, but that has much to do with the fact that I will miss my local friends, my job and my coworkers whom I enjoy a lot, and we are making a huge life change in faith that things are going to “work out” on the other end. What I am finding, however, is that while my emotions may not always be totally on board with the move, God has been faithful to come through with the solutions we need as we need them. While it would be nice if God showed up early at times, He has met each of our needs every step of the way.
I recently heard a speaker point out that we have the God-given power to alter probabilities. When we engage our faith toward something, we shift the probabilities of certain events occurring in our favor. No one told my wife how we were supposed to find a new house, pack, and then sell our current house. However, months before we did any of this she made some very conscious decisions about what she wanted to see happen. She activated her faith, the time-space continuum shifted (in spite of my fear-based attempts to shift it back), and many things have continued to work out step by step as we go. There has been a lot of warfare along the way, but the lesson here for me has been a reminder that we truly do get to choose a lot of what happens in our lives. I have a choice each day and with every choice I make to partner with God in faith or partner with the enemy in fear. What kind of choices do I want to make, and what kind of person will that transform me into over time? I choose to become a man of great faith, and I am thankful that from time to time God reminds me how to walk that out.
