It was a moment I never saw coming. Sure, things were weird. There were red flags whipping in the winds of something I could not control. I prayed, I confronted, I prayed again, I waited. I tried and prayed again. Yet, here was the truth of the affair. And there I stood watching as my husband of twenty years (who was a pastor) drove away. He was leaving me, our daughters, and our church. My life changed in an instant and where was God?
Psalms 33:11 tells us God created the world and all that is in it. And by his power and the power of his Son, it is sustained. He does not change and his Word never fails. So, God in his perfect wisdom, before I was even born had a plan for my days.
But what about that day? What about the plans I had for my life at that time? What about my hopes, dreams, and expectations? I prayed, worked, planned, and did all the right things. Yet, on that day it didn’t matter. As I stood there nearly paralyzed with pain and fear, I questioned everything except God. Why? Because I knew from experience he could be trusted.
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What image comes to mind when you hear the words fixed or unchangeable? What emotion do these words bring up in you?
The image that comes to mind for me is the insurance commercial with crash dummies. In the commercial, the car careens toward a fixed cement wall, and you feel your body bracing for impact. Then, the inevitable happens: the front of the vehicle crumbles against the wall, the airbag explodes, and the crash dummy is tossed around inside the car—resulting in the immovable object destroying the car and “injuring” the dummies inside.
Or maybe when you think about unchangeable, you remember a time, like me, when I had to scrap the plans already in motion for our women's groups to accommodate the plans being made for the whole church—resulting in discouragement and frustration over what seemed like inflexible and unrelenting disregard for our team.
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Where did we get the idea that some things – like books or movies or professions or fast food restaurants – are Christian and some are not? We even push that idea to believe that certain nations are Christian (or at least God-fearing) and others are not. Our classification of inanimate objects as good or evil, and even considering something secular because it doesn’t contain God’s name or have Scripture verses in it, is nothing new.
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Before I became a Christian, I was raised in a home full of prejudices of every kind against those who were of a different nationality, race, social status, and even church denominations!
Anyone who was different in any way from my family was to be judged as somehow unacceptable. As an adult, I continued to see this same warped way of viewing those who might be different in any way. Neighbors who looked down on other neighbors, family members refusing to accept other family members, nations hating other nations, etc.
When I became a Christian and invited Jesus Christ to come and dwell within me through the Holy Spirit, something truly unique and miraculous happened.
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