My heart has been heavy here lately. My mind has been boggled. My thoughts have been all over the place. Discouraged. Confused. Restless.
Tara & I have been here in Little Rock for almost 2 years now. And when we moved down here from Fayetteville for medical school, we left everything behind. Amazing jobs we loved, family, friends & all sorts of support. So moving was certainly a challenge. But we felt the Lord was directing us here for His purpose, so we came even at the expense of those things. We wanted to be obedient no matter what.
And in our obedience, the LORD has certainly blessed! He has given me an amazing opportunity to minister to students at a growing church in New Life Baptist. The LORD has used us in mighty ways to bring glory to His kingdom & He has proven to be great & faithful through it all. We've made lasting relationships, developed some roots, seen tremendous spiritual growth & gone through life-changing experiences we would have never experienced otherwise. God has been good to say the least.
So that's where things got complicated. In our desire to be obedient, God moved & provided us with a ministry to invest in. God proved He had directed us to Little Rock for a purpose. And God confirmed He had called us to minister to students at New Life Baptist Church.
Which wasn't necessarily our plan. Because when we moved, we knew there was a possibility to return to Fayetteville for Tara to finish her 3rd & 4th years of school. We weren't counting on being bound by anything here. But God had other plans. So when that time came around to make that decision to stay here or go on back to NWA this Spring, you can imagine the torment. The stress. The hours of thoughts spent on what to do.
On one hand, everything we wanted was back in Fayetteville. We could go finish up school in a better location, be surrounded by family & old friends, possibly make a return to an old job we loved & be in the place we wanted to be.
But that's not what God wanted for us. That's what we wanted. And as much as we pleaded with Him, He simply never said "GO." We realized we were wanting God's will to line up with our plans instead of the other way around. We were attempting to force God's plan to be ours. Which was so sinful of us. Of me especially.
In our hearts, we were simply attempting to discern God's will. We so desperately wanted to be obedient to Him. We prayed, sought wisdom & spent time in His word to figure it out. But we were also being so selfish in trying to make things work out for us. So selfish in worrying about our lives being perfect & things being the way we wanted them.
Life's hard when you try to outweigh God's will with your own selfish desires. When you try to manipulate God's will & use "signs" to have things work out the way you want. But at the center of it all is sin. The real issue comes not from God providing clear direction - but from your selfishness smearing the map.
This experience boldly echoed John 3:30 into our lives, which says "HE must become greater; I must become less." Our prayer is for God to be BIGGER in our lives. Bigger in our decisions. Bigger in our plans. Bigger in our direction. And definitely bigger than our wants & desires.
May His plans become our plans. May His decisions become our decisions. May His direction become our direction. And may His wants & desires become our wants & desires for our lives.
in CHRIST > jv
