Time is a difficult thing. At this point in my life, I don't want to wish any of it away but want to try my best to spend this diminishing currency well. Yet, I'm ready to get to the next chapter. I get impatient when I read books. It's often the in between space that is just setting the scene or developing the character. I have the urge to start skimming until I get to the important parts, but life doesn't work that way. Skimming turns to idle waiting which turns to either apathy or biding your time not doing anything. The story is on a holding pattern as you wait for the next chapter to arrive.

But what if the next chapter is actually dependent on writing the inbetween? Won't we feel silly when we realize we did more waiting than living. 

Here was my prayer on that day:

The serpent insinuates that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil will make you “wise” and “like God.” And that’s the temptation that continues to trip us up today. Like Adam and Eve, we still naively believe that it’s possible for us to become like GOD. We believe he’s somehow holding out on us. We think if just we dig deep enough and explore far enough, we’ll actually find some secret, magical truth that will give us the answers to make it on our own—something that will substitute our need for a Creator God. We distrust the words God has already told us of what will satisfy and we choose to go off and double check for ourselves. 

Because everything promises this. In just three easy steps you can do what really should take months of hard work! We think what she promises with her look will be true and that it will bring a new freedom and sense of confidence. We believe the “you just give a little seed now, and it’ll come back to you ten-fold… so I’ll need your credit card number and social security number to make it happen.”

It comes down to our complete urge to test what the “wet paint” sign has been telling us all along. Sin hijacks our curiosity and turns us toward promises of easy-gains. Sin doesn’t look like sin when it’s right in front of us. It looks like what will finally make all our dreams come true. Eventually we realize we were duped by the serpent again. But after a bit of time, the serpent comes back in his expensive suit and slicked back hair and tells us about a new tree with new promises and we somehow can't connect the dots. 

I wrote this August 1st of 2012. I never posted it because I never expanded on all the ideas that I bullet-pointed. But I came across it today and these bullet points still resonate with me:

This has been a long year. 

I was laid off from my position at Lifepointe Christian Church because despite all of our best efforts and prayers, there wasn’t enough money in the budget.  August 1st will mark one year to the day of when this happened.   August 1st is also my first official day at Suncrest Christian church as their new Highland Campus worship pastor.  One year exactly.  It seems too exact to be some random happenstance to me.  So I decided to try to quantify why God decided I needed exactly one year for this transition.

There are always opportunities to be used by God even when your life is not where you want it to be.  Joseph in the dungeon.  Me in the heart of Indiana.  Honestly, at first I felt like it was my dungeon.

God loves us no matter what. This does not mean his stamp of approval is therefore on everything we choose to do or seems right to us.  

We’ve got to be careful with the mindset that says “I’m not where I’m supposed to be” and realize it's usually “I’m not where I want to be.” God is more concerned with who we are than where we are.