The Process

As the holiday weekend wrapped up and we packed for our return trip home to New Mexico, I was not looking forward to the drive home. I said a silent prayer wishing God could just beam us back, knowing it was unlikely. I don’t mind the drive, just didn’t want it after a such a short trip.

I thought about how in my walk with God I also often want Him to beam me the answer or the change. I want the results but I would love to be able to bypass the process. I need to lose weight, and would love the miracle where I get an instant answer and then just need to maintain God’s ideal weight for me. I think His answer is no to that repeated request. He knows I need to learn the disciple if I am really going to maintain it.

Most of the examples we are given in the Bible are refined in the process. Joseph spent thirteen years between the dream and the palace. Moses spent forty years in the desert before he was prepared to lead the Israelites for forty years. David waited about fifteen years from his anointing to becoming king. Even Jesus walked thirty-three years from the manger to the cross.

If God had taken Joseph from the pit his brothers threw him in directly to saving the land from famine, it might have went to his cocky little head. Instead God allowed Joseph to learn a dependence on Him even even knowing he had not done anything that would justify his imprisonment. We have no idea the things that God was working out in Joseph only that God took him from the pit to serving a leader, to prison and then to the palace. We see the process, we know the product but we don’t have insight into what God was really pruning off his life.

As much as I want the quick results, I know that in the process God is changing me. He is preparing my character for what He wants to do through me. He is preparing my heart for the weight of what might be placed on me. He is preparing my spirit for the dependency I have to have on Him in order to do anything, so that what He has place in me does not destroy me. 

When you find yourself in the waiting, try to do some self-reflection in what God is trying to show you. Spend time in prayer to discover what He is pruning from you in the process. It is only when we are prepared that we will be able to walk in our full purpose and the plans He has created for us.