God and Me-Product vs. Process

I often feel like when I sit down to write my thoughts on what God has been doing in my life, that lately, it seems to center around me sharing my complaints with God.  When I leaf back through my journal, I find that my prayers are often full of question marks and wishing to know what God has planned or wishing that God would act in a certain way. 

I wish our house would sell so we could be closer to my husband's work.

I wish our house would sell so we could be in a different town and able to minister to D's soccer boys in different ways than we do now.

I wish I knew what we will do when we do move:  are we buying a house in town or buying farmland with my folks in a partnership and then building?

I wish I had a consistent part time work schedule.

I wish that each month didn't feel like the extra money was always spent on adoption bills, house repair bills, or medical bills.

I wish that we would have finalized Conleigh's adoption in 2010 so we could claim it on our taxes and anticipate the refund that the adoption tax credit affords.

I wish that we had a strong sense of what direction to head to grow our family.

I wish that we had the money to finance another adoption.

The list often comes back to these same things:  money, our housing situation, our ability to minister through D's job, our ability to grow our family.  Almost always it's those things.  And it has been those things for a while now. 

Many of those things have to do with ministry and calling.  Feeling called by God to use our house in certain ways.  Feeling called by God to parent.  Feeling called by God that D has an incredible sphere of influence through his coaching job.

But at this moment, there are a lot of unknowns.  There are a lot of things that I want to look a certain way because in my mind, if they looked that way, life would be easiser and we could serve God better.  It's frustrating when things that are good, things that are a part of how you believe God would use you get stuck in wait mode. 

I've been there at least once before.  We waited 15 months for Conleigh's files to be released from a Haitian government office.  One office with no movement for 15 months.  It was beyond long.  It was hard to know that her adoption was a good, God ordained thing but to feel like God was silently working in painfully small ways.  It was a struggle at times to pray about it.

And in some ways, that's kind of where I am now.  I feel like we are standing on the brink of good things like an addition to our family or a new home that allows us to do more for God.  We've been standing at that spot quite some time now. 

But what is hard is that God is not a product oriented God. 

He is instead a God of the process. 

He could easily get us from point A to point B.  But instead life detours around point B, stalls out at point C, meanders around points D and E, and eventually ends at point F, a place we didn't even consider going. 

For some reason, I am consumed with the end point but God is fascinated by the middle.  The detours and stalling and meandering are His thing.  Very little is said in the Bible about end points.  Noah on the ark?  No one really knows what the 40 days and 40 nights were really like.  Isrealites in the Promised Land?  Isn't their story mostly about being lost in the desert?  Jonah in Ninavah?  More stormy seas, a big fish, and a complaining prophet than a detailed description of his arrival into town.

It is what we do in those moments of waiting that matters.  It seems to be about our interactions with Him.  It seems to be about dry hearts thirsting for Him, about heavy hearts crying to Him, about yielded hearts continuing before Him, about questioning hearts choosing to question Him.

I don't like this part of life very much.  I don't like feeling like I'm constantly complaining to God about how I would like things to be.  I don't like not knowing what the future holds or having some sense of vision as to what the next steps in our life should be.  I feel like we are heading out blind in a lot of different directions at once and hoping God shows up.  So for now, we wait.  We've thrown our hats into several different rings, so to speak, and so for now, we will just watch and wait.