I Know Who Goes Before Me...

“Lean on, trust in, and be confident in the Lord with all your heart and mind, and do not rely on your own insight or understanding. In all your ways know, recognize, and acknowledge Him, and He will direct and make straight and plain your paths.”—Proverbs 3:5-6, Amplified           

What’s the first thing that often comes to mind when you step out on a big decision after you think you are getting the Lord’s leading on something, and it turns out that it wasn’t what you thought? “Wow, dude, missed it again!” Maybe. But perhaps more likely, we just think we missed it when, in fact, God has a way of using our shaky steps of trust to help us see something more important than that big decision.

This is a big deal. Hardly a week goes by when we aren’t faced with some huge or relatively small decision that feels like we’re jumping without a safety net. There has been no “God told me so” voice from heaven, only a persistent, feels-like-God-might-be-behind-this sense deep within. So, you test it some more, pray about it a lot, perhaps seek Godly counsel about it all. And, on occasion, try to talk yourself out of it. Finally, if there are no obvious red flags, there comes no other option—you choose to trust God, launch out, leap, and see what happens…

…and even though the enemy of your soul may have been chuckling from the sidelines, the landing is safe, even without a net. God-focused trust, even scared-to-death trust, always has the last laugh. Sometimes, though, the details of what lies ahead after the leap don’t wind up being anywhere what you expected. Not a bad thing, just a wonderfully strange journey. “God, what was that all about?!” And sooner or later, we realize that we had not “missed it” at all, because beyond what we thought was simply making a decision, we learned something else very important—perhaps more important—by taking that leap. Something we’d been blind to that probably wouldn’t have been seen any other way.

But why? Not to mess with our heads, or because God likes to play shell games with all of life’s decisions. But because His Love poured out is always good, and has one goal in every situation of life: to transform and conform us to be like Jesus in all of our spheres of influence, our actions, our attitudes, our serving, our speech. In the words of Charles Spurgeon: "We cannot always trace God's hand, but we can always trust God's heart."

For all the leaps of faith big and small yet to come, it is good to know that:

“… God is able to orchestrate everything to work toward something good and beautiful when we love Him and accept His invitation to live according to His plan. From the distant past, His eternal love reached into the future. You see, He knew those who would be His one day, and He chose them beforehand to be conformed to the image of His Son so that Jesus would be the firstborn of a new family of believers—all brothers and sisters. … He called them to a different destiny so that they would experience what it means to be made right with God and share in His glory. So, what should we say about all of this? If God is on our side, then tell me: whom should we fear? — Romans 8:28-31

“I know Who goes before me, I know Who stands behind: the God of angel armies is always by my side. The One who reigns forever, He is a friend of mine..."— E. Cash, S. Cash, C. Tomlin