Gen 12:1 “Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household, and go to the land I will show you.”
A brilliant spiritually-searching physicist, John Kavanaugh, spent an extended season at Mother Teresa’s ‘House of the Dying’ in his quest for answers to direction in life. As was her habit, she asked him on their first morning together:
“What can I do for you?”
“Prayer.”
“What kind of prayer.”
Immediately, sensing he was getting nearer to the Holy Grail for which he’d travelled thousands of miles, he said: “Please pray that I get clarity for the future.”
“No!” she retorted emphatically, “I will not do that. Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.”
“But you always seem to have clarity,” Kavanaugh pleaded, somewhat discouraged.
Mother Teresa laughed, and through her winsome smile said: “I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray you trust God.”
It is human instinct to cover all our bases, to have all our ducks lined up, to be in control of our circumstances. So we end up living by sight, not by faith. Instead God beckons us forward in our journey of faith, stretching us out of our comfort zones. Notice how Abra(ha)m was called to go ‘to the land I will show you’. He didn’t know where on earth he was going, but had to step out in trust, with very little clarity, just clinging to the promise that God would unfold his plan.
Whatever you’re going through today, God’s got big hands. He is trustworthy. Only through trials and testing do we develop stronger faith muscles. Be comforted by Oswald Chambers’ words: “Future plans are uncertain, but we all know that there is first God’s plan to be lived, and we can safely leave everything to Him, ‘carefully careless’ of it all.”
God Almighty, I choose to trust you today, whether things are crystal clear or not. Amen!
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