An Agenda with God
A Rocky Path to Trust
My journey to learn to trust God has been somewhat of a bumpy ride. Rocks in the road needed to be removed before I could move forward. Sometimes I didn’t realize the obstacles were there until I felt their jarring presence. In my ideal world there might have been a few pebbles and perhaps a few river rocks, but no boulders. Instead, I found myself stumbling over a path strewn with stony hurdles.
My early thirties was a season of facing the harshness of my childhood experience. It was also the season of recognizing the effects of it on my adult life. I felt broken and messy, as did my marriage and parenting. God was mightily at work but the pace seemed slow. I didn’t recognize His hand moving in me and my situation because many of the circumstances and relational issues remained unchanged.
Demands of God
I sat with an older friend, a mentor in the Lord, and unloaded my anger and contempt at God.
“I don’t believe God loves me. I don’t believe He hears my prayers. It is clear He doesn’t care about me or the details of my life. If there are changes in my circumstances, I will have to achieve them. Clearly God is not showing up for me.”
My friend listened patiently, then asked, “What do you think it would take for you to believe that God loves you?”
My hand opened and I began pointing to each finger, angrily listing off my demands.
“Number one, if God really loved me, He would… Number two, I would be able to… Number three, my abusers would… Number four, I wouldn’t... Number five, I would know…”
The echo of my contempt reverberated through the room. The anger I felt toward God for not giving me what I wanted and believed I should have—and even needed to have—was palpable. I had an agenda with God. I believed He needed to show up and meet my demands. How else could I trust Him unless He did what I believed He should do to prove His love for me?
My friend remarked, “God never responds to an agenda. He is too wise to do that. If He gave in to your demands, it wouldn’t be love. It would be an unhealthy response to manipulation.
Healthy Love
Healthy love was a foreign concept to me. What would it look like to experience God’s love? I would need to let Him love me in His own way and not as a response to my demands. I would need to release my agenda.
Letting go of my demands frightened me. It revealed the anxiety buried in my soul. I worried that perhaps God didn’t love me. My demands were my way of trying to gain His attention.
Allowing God to love me in His way felt vulnerable. It meant I wasn’t in control. It meant I would have to let my guard down so that it didn’t get in the way of His expressions of love toward me. My wall of self-protection no longer served me. It hindered me from experiencing the love of God and others.
Relaxing my Grip
As I began to relax my grip on the agenda, God opened the eyes of my heart and mind so that I could recognize Him loving me well. As I did, His care for me in ways that didn’t match my agenda began to heal my heart.
Holding a narrow view of how I wanted to be loved kept me from experiencing the expansiveness of God’s creative ability to love me in personal ways. The five fingered agenda was too small. In opening my hands to receive God’s gifts, I discovered that He loved me all day everyday.
Tallying God’s daily gifts of love began to change me. It freed me from the bondage I didn’t realize my agenda created in me. If I had held to the five fingered agenda for God, I would have focused on what I didn’t have, rather than what I did have. Choosing to remember these gifts gave me a grateful heart, rather than a bitter one.
Releasing my agenda helped me to embrace God’s greatest gift of love, and that was Jesus’s death on the cross for me. Until that point, His death seemed removed from my daily experience. Now it means everything to me.
“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13 ESV).
Photo by Jessica Delp on Unsplash
Questions to Ponder: When you think of Jesus’s death on the cross for you as an individual, how does it affect you? Does it touch your daily life? Why do you think that is so?