Embracing God’s Story for Your Life
Tim Keller said, “We are God’s priority. To each of us he says, ‘What in my life is more important than you?’”
These are the words we spend our energy reaching to hear. Behind our incessant drive for others to receive us, to win at the tasks in front of us, to be noticed in some measure and be included, to be enfolded into family is a drive to be someone’s priority. To find a forever home in someone we trust. And much of our adult lives are God hedging us so that we might finally see only one someone, only one family that will not disappoint, only one home that is forever safe.
Our limits are purposed, not accidental. We push past them to find what we’re craving, but God can develop in us a much smaller push for more significant things, a push that starts with our eyes.
Watchfulness. It enables us to enter the story, whether fielding our losses, letting ourselves grieve them, or breathing the sigh of surrender that says, “Your story, God, not mine.”
Watchfulness—on the back end of the cycle of loss, grief, and surrender we inevitably work our way through dozens of times in our lives—can be full of wonder. Watchfulness can make us children again, finding the treasure of home.
Once on my Saturday-morning drive home from the gym, I decided to turn off the music—no voice memos to friends or podcasts, either. I’d been choosing to sit in silence a bit more often, noticing that my body, mind, and heart were more tired than I had assessed.
On this Saturday, my heart felt expectant. I was becoming more comfortable choosing watchfulness over vigilance regarding the details of my life. So I turned off the noise from my phone and rolled down the windows to absorb the sounds and colors outside my car.
Within a minute, I saw two flitting monarchs move from one end of my windshield to the other. I could barely enjoy these two before I saw another, and another, then two more. If they had been higher up in the sky, I would have imagined them to be twos and threes of distant birds. But they were monarchs, more of them. And still more. I stopped counting at thirty.
Cars raced around me on this four-lane road, focused drivers headed to Lowe’s or their sons’ soccer games or a Saturday runners meet-up at the park. Their music was loud and their eyes were glazed, like mine often are—not in the selah of the moment but already mentally in the next. Had it been yesterday, I wouldn’t have noticed a butterfly. Perhaps they were there yesterday and I missed them on this familiar road, mind bent toward task and calendar item. No one around me appeared to notice the parade of monarchs on display.
This was watchfulness. God was teaching me. It’s a seventeen-minute drive to my gym, and many days I don’t know what happened during those seventeen minutes. Seventeen minutes of ruminating about my life or planning the next task or frozen in a mental loop that tires me. But this day, He was teaching me watchfulness: within my reach is a world full of beauty and story and whispers of God, waiting to make this day rich and different from the last and different from the next. The monotony of morning rhythms and teaching littles their letters and big kids to drive and serving meal after meal after meal is continuously interrupted by a wonder He is offering me. But when my eyes are locked on what I can’t have, on what this season isn’t, on where I am not, on what may come that might hinder me, I have no room for watchfulness.
Paul encourages us: “I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16). This concept can feel big and ethereal, out of reach. But His Spirit helps us when we can’t get our minds around what it might mean to walk by the Spirit. He meets us where we are and in small ways. With a whisper—like the butterfly—saying, Find me here. Home is here, where I am.
Adapted from The Gift of Limitations: Finding Beauty in Your Boundaries by Sara Hagerty.
The Gift of Limitations: Finding Beauty in Your Boundaries
Are you feeling stretched to your limits and wish those limits weren’t there at all? In The Gift of Limitations, you will learn to see the beauty and peace God provides in the midst of our life circumstances—and the deep spiritual growth we can experience through the limitations that we once thought held us back.
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