Continuing from a previous post of February 15,2024, Flexibility from his book ‘The Will of God as a Way of live, continuing Jerry Sittser teaches:
The Apostle Paul wanted to teach the gospel in territories where no missionaries had gone. But the clarity of the calling did not always create a strait path for him. He rarely ended up where he set out to go. He spent only a few months in Thessalonica, barely getting the new church off the ground before enemies drove him out. He worked eighteen months in Corinth, yet the church there gave him the most trouble. He was beaten, shipwrecked, and hounded by opposition from the left and from the right. Jewish leaders prosecuted him and Roman soldiers kept throwing him in jail. Paul could have viewed much of his life as lost time, wasted time.
But Paul was flexible. He persisted in doing the will of God as it mysteriously unfolded before him, as if it were Alice making his way through the Wonderland of the Roman world. “For I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well fed and going hungry, of having plenty and being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”5 Paul remained flexible, responding as creatively as he could to circumstance beyond his control. He was also a man of prayer. We can only wonder if he had a good sense of humor as well, or at least an appreciation for irony.
If we want to do God’s will, we must try to live life with a light touch. We should, of course, pursue our dreams, chart a course, make our plans, follow a schedule, and thus do what we think God’s wants us to do. But always, always with a light touch. We may discern at an early age what God wants us to accomplish and end up doing exactly that. We may dazzle the world with the perfect order of our lives and our incredible productivity. But we might also flunk out of graduate school, break the record for consecutive losing seasons, or bury our only daughter before she has the chance to bury us. We may live most of our days in chaos and have little to show for how busy we always seem to be. I remember many times coming home from work and asking Lynda, “What did you do today?” She would look around the house and say, “I don’t know what I did. But I was busy doing nothing all day long.”. . . . .
. . . . . Faithfulness to God is God’s will for our lives, even if we never end up doing what we had planned. We should try to stay true to God, however often life changes course. We may expect to follow one course, believing that God has willed it to be so, only to be forced to follow another. We will lose a spouse or a child, leave one career and make up another one, fail in a business venture, or end up in a wheelchair. We will lose control, but if we are flexible, living life with a light touch, we will discover that God is with us still, calling us to do His will under circumstance that we did not expect or want. The Bedford Falls we wished to escape will become home to us.
These three principles—simplicity, balance, and flexibility—do not promise that our days will be any less demanding, busy, or conflicted. We still have jobs to do, family and friends to care for, meetings to attend, projects to accomplish, meals to cook, laundry to fold, lawns to mow, teams to coach, and causes to uphold. We will face interruptions, disappointment, crises, and all the rest. Our many callings will vie for our attention like triplets crying for their mother, all at the same time. Simplicity, however, will remind us of the one thing that matters most: an unhindered devotion to God. Balance will enable us to order our lives according to good priorities. Flexibility will help us to adjust to the surprises we will face along the way. And, through it all, God will remain absolutely devoted to us.
Still, there is one experience in life that appears to make these principles, however useful, almost irrelevant. Simplicity, balanced, and flexibility are hard enough to practice when life seems normal. But what happens when life takes a sudden turn and departs from what we consider normal? How do we find and do the will of God when we have to face suffering? ~Jerry Sittser, The Will of God as a Way of Life (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530) p.196-200
(Continued with ‘Living with Paradox’. . . )
