Confessions of a Control-Freak

This little article goes out to all the over-thinkers, the doubters and the control-freaks.

To the people who are struggling to make sense of a situation, to those who are desperately trying to figure out what God is up to.

I hear ya, and this is for you.

Maybe you’re waiting for something and the whole waiting-game has got you going crazy.

Maybe you’ve been thrown into something new/different and it’s proving to be much harder than you thought.

Maybe something is coming to an end, and you would rather it lasted a little longer.

And while all of this is swirling around us, we have one question- God, what are you doing?!

You see, some seasons of our lives simply don’t make sense to us, and our natural reaction is to try and figure out what God is doing in a way that does make sense to us, we try our hardest to get our head around things and then we can be okay with it because we finally get it. But I have some freeing news for you; sometimes, what God is doing in your life won’t make sense. You don’t have to try so hard to figure it out, you’re not meant to get it ALL.

Some of the seasons you go through won’t have a title until much later on. And that’s ok. Sense is over-rated anyway.

There’s a really well-known bible verse that says it this way:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. – Proverbs 3:5

What the author is telling us here is that we can’t do both; we can’t trust God with all our heart AND rely on ourselves to figure everything out. We have to pick one or the other.

Here’s the thing, God will totally love and adore us more than we could ever imagine no matter what option we pick, that’s just a given, but we will have a much harder time if we chose our understanding over His.

That’s because, well, He’s God, and we’re not.

Shocker, I know.

And I want you to know that I get it, I’m a PhD student, which basically means that I’m a chronic over-thinker. I want everything figured out, because I want to know exactly what God is up to. Basically, as much as I hate to admit it, I want control.

My prayers tend to go a little something like this:

Hey God, so you know you mentioned that you want me to do this thing – well I know how we should do it. We need to do this, then we need to get this, then we need to talk to this person, and then we’re there. Job done.

Cool? Cool. Amen.

You see my problem?

If only I knew what He knew. If only I saw things how He see’s things, my prayers would look a lot different.

Where I’m in a rush, He’s always patient.

Where I’m anxious, He never is.

Where I want everything done quickly, He wants everything done beautifully.

If you’re in a season that makes no sense to you, good. That means that God is up to something way beyond your imagination. He isn’t just writing a strategic step-by-step plan for your life, he’s creatively and patiently writing a beautiful story, trust Him with it. He knows exactly what He’s doing.

Trust me, you can look forward to the day when you can look back and realise what he was up to all along, but for now you have a choice: Your understanding or His?