In my third through eighth grade years my family lived on a 40
acre farm in Michigan. We raised some chickens, occasionally some ducks and a
pile of barn cats. My mom insisted on having a garden in which to torture her
sons with the spirit-breaking task of pulling weeds 45 minutes a few days each
summer while paying five cents for each ice cream bucket that we filled. That
was the extent of our farming. Two fields were rented out to a neighbor who
planted corn in them and there were two fields that had been hay fields for the
previous owner. Since we didn’t raise livestock we let the grass grow tall in
those fields.
We called these two unfenced hay fields of tall grass “the
weeds” to distinguish them from the areas of cut grass around the house that we
called the lawn. My brothers and I spent hours playing in the weeds every
summer. There were no trails so we would blaze our own, carrying our bare arms
at shoulder height so they wouldn’t be cut by the slicing blades of grass.
Sometimes we would turn around and follow our new trail back out and sometimes
we would make a new trail through to the other side of the field.
Standing on the edge of the field I could see where we had
been. I don’t remember any of the trails ever being straight. Each one
meandered and twisted through the tall grass. Sometimes they went around
patches of nettles or around a rock but most of the time the crooked path was
simply due to the fact that something inside us told us to step over this way
or follow the slope of the land that way. Or, more likely, there was nothing
inside of us that insisted that we travel a straight line.
As a kid it would have
made no sense to stand at the edge of the field and wait for a path to appear
so that I knew where to go. I knew that playing in the field was fun and a
large part of the fun was creating our own trails. We learned painful and
irritating lessons about nettles and cockleburs by walking through them. We
would be startled and excited by a noisy pheasant taking flight being flushed
from its hiding place in the weeds. We would avoid the corner of the field where
we could smell that a skunk den had been built. We were scared out of the field
for days when a ground hog bull rushed its way past us low in the grass.
Had we stood on the side of the field waiting for a path to
appear we would have missed all of this.
That’s the problem with waiting for God to reveal each new
step in our lives. It completely ignores the fact that we learn through our
experiences. It actually disengages us from the fullness of life that is given
to us as a gift. But the biggest problem is that it immobilizes us with fear.
When we wait to be absolutely sure of God’s next step for us we become anxious
that we will miss it. We hesitate, afraid that it is too soon to move. We fret
that we may have missed our opportunity and now it is too late.
The Plan
For I know the plans I
have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you,
plans to give you hope and a future.
-Jeremiah 29:11
I believe that God does have a plan for us. However, it is not as specific as we sometimes wish that it would be. Instead, what if God’s plan for us is to set us free from fear (fear of
harm, destruction, death etc…) so that we can live in the fullness of this
life? What if God’s deepest desire isn’t to create a world full of obedient
people but is to see the gift of this life experienced in all of its glory and
tragedy? What if the point is to be blazing trails through the field of life
instead of standing where we are in hopes that a straight and narrow trail with
fences on both sides appears to lead us to the other side?
So then, if we are truly engaged and are blazing trails
through this field of life, what does it mean to “wait upon the Lord?” What
exactly are we waiting for?
A bit more about that tomorrow…
