Take God Out of the Box

I’m not sure if it is my obsessive need to always be doing something, aka, avoiding cleaning my home and organizing my office, or if I am just really that busy, but life has got me spinning. Every single time I turn around I am doing something or going somewhere. I had gotten really good at going to bed by a certain time and making sure I was recieving the rest I needed to keep up with my busy life, but recently I find myself, walking at midnight, no literally walking my street at midnight with my husband, because I can’t sleep. My mind is wandering to the next day’s happenings before I have even put to rest that day’s events. This is not like me. I have always loved and embraced the scripture, Matthew 6:34 “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” However, instead of not worrying about tomorrow, I find myself constantly making mental “to do” lists that keep growing and growing and growing.  Am I really that busy?  I guess better questions to ask myself is: do I need to be that busy or am I avoiding something greater by keeping myself busy?

I also love the scripture that says “God won’t put more on us than we can bear...” 1 Corinthians 10:13; I'm paraphrasing here, but what a lot of us fail to see is that we can take things on ourselves that God never intended to be a part of our journey. I decided to take a timeout and dissect my day. Wife, mother, minister...check, check, check. Again, I am becoming obsessed with “to do” lists. These are things that I know are a part of God’s Will for my life. The things that come along with those titles are also a part of my life. However, do I need to take my kids every place they want to go when they want to go? No. Do I have to fill my schedule to the max with meetings and errands and bible study 24/7? No. I have created this binding schedule of never ending lists of things to do, taking the control of my life out of God’s hands and taking charge of it myself. Dangerous ground, very dangerous ground. I find myself filling every hour of my day with something to do. Some may say this is being productive, I find it exhausting, overwhelming and completely insane; and actually not productive because I am avoiding things that need to be done, why, because I don’t like doing them. Ha-ha! Truth, absolute truth! I used to thrive on balance and I was happy. Work hard and play hard has been mine and my husband’s motto for living; or in some cases work hard, rest much. I used to balance the things I didn’t want to do with doing them the same day as doing things I like to do, kind of like a reward for myself, for getting past myself.  What has changed?

I was recently talking to a friend about some problems they have going on in their life. Immediately I recognized two spirits residing inside of them; control and fear. Ugh...why do we do that; we can see it so well in others but looking in the mirror at our self is horrifying. As I listened to them I came to the conclusion that they have put God in a box. This person is not trusting that God can handle their situations. They may say they are, but their actions are the complete opposite. Their need for control appears to be crippling them and the fear factor is completely debilitating. I literally envisioned this person sitting on a box, with God inside, shaking their head, saying “Nope, no..no..no, Lord it has to be this way”. Do you ever find yourself doing this? You have spent months, maybe years, fixating on a problem and then you think you have finally found the solution, and then bam, God intervenes; not because He doesn’t want us to have the victory, but because He wants us to depend completely and totally on Him. The Word says in Proverbs 16:9 “We can make our plans, but the Lord determines our steps.” It is great to have a plan, God likes it when we take action, but not without consulting Him first, or waiting on Him, or stepping out of His timing. I was observing this person’s life and thinking to myself, God I never want to be like that, please help me.

Through that encounter, I saw that I too, had put God in a box. I had taken over control of my daily schedule without seeking what was most important to Him. I took a deep breath and said “Okay, Lord, I am letting you out of the box, please show me what is most important to you, and what does not have to get done today or even tomorrow.” I pleaded with God to forgive me for allowing myself to get so busy, with things that I was piling on myself, and other things that I was ignoring due to dislike or fear, and I asked for His help. Tears rolled down my face when God showed me my family. My husband and my children come first. I have always tried really hard to have balance in my life and I have always felt that my husband and kids come first, but God showed me, we have entered a new season of life. My kids are older and my ministry is growing. The schedule that worked for me in the past is not working so well for me now. I was clinging so hard to what worked before that I failed to see that it wasn’t working now. I was keeping the old way of doing things, but adding more and more stuff to it, and my list of dislikes was growing too and ignoring them wasn’t helping things. Can I just tell you, I detest housework. I hate it because I work so hard to organize things and then in like 30 seconds my family comes in, and my eight hours of hard work is unrecognizable. There are also many things that I enjoy doing so much more that I rationalize their importance over the things I dislike. Housework is not the only thing I dislike, but that list is too long for this post.

As God intervened I could see how I had packed up God and put Him away and said, “I got this”. I was still calling on Him for the usual, daily encouragement, guidance, knowledge, strength, but not fully relinquishing control of why I needed those things from Him in my life. But He answered my prayer, just not in the way I thought it was going to be answered. I had to change things up a bit. I had to unpack that box, let God out, and let Him move things around, shake things up and surrender complete control to Him. I am proud to say, I did it.

Why do we put God in the box to begin with? We are afraid. We are afraid He is going to make us do something we don’t want to or something that is uncomfortable to our flesh. We are selfish beings. We were all born into sin and until we completely surrender to God’s Will in our lives, we continue to

seek what makes “us” happy. We like being in control. This is another branch off of fear. We feel if we are in control then we know what to expect or at least we think we do. We don’t like being surprised. The list goes on and on, but the bottom line is, if we really believe God knows what is best for our lives then we will relinquish control to Him. And when we do, from my experience, things work out so much better than we could have possibly planned.

One of the coolest schedule changes that God showed me was combining some things. My oldest teen saw me putting my sneakers on one day and asked if I was going for a walk. I told him I was and he said well if you wait for me I’ll walk with you. He was headed to the bus stop. I was blessed beyond measure. It was random because I normally wait until all of my kids are off to school before I go for my walk, but God allowed this moment to show me different. Now I walk my highschooler up, then my middle schooler asked me to walk him up to the bus stop and I always walk up my baby girl, so now I get a full workout in before I would have even started my workout; their bus stop is a good distance from the house. God is so good. He has also shown me some other things in my life that I can move around or even put off until another time and why tackling some things instead of putting them off is so important. It has been so cool, letting go and letting God.

One of the greatest lessons I learned in all of this, is that, we can’t put God in a box. We can never get to a place where we think “I got this”. We need to keep God front and center all of the time. We can’t  tell Him how to do His job. We also have to be open to letting Him do His job. So many of us think we know the best way to do something and “if God” would just do this or that then everything would be perfect in our lives. Not so. Because it isn’t just about us. God may tell us to quit something, do something, not do something etc., that we think is absolutely absurd, it does not make sense in our carnal minds, but in the grand scheme of things, it works miracles. I  want to encourage you today, take God out of the box, and then sit back and watch Him work wonders in your life.