Monday Musings - God as Personal Priest or Open-Heart Surgeon?

This has been a season of trying to discern what it is that God would have us do once we're finished with school in a little over a year, and the past few days, I've been processing through a couple questions:

First, what are some of the dreams that God has put on my heart regarding how He might want to use me?

But perhaps the more difficult question is this:

Are my dreams and desires even aligned with God's dreams and desires for my life or am I so much a product of my culture that I have simply equated what I want with what I think God wants and I pray for Him to bless it?

Consider these convicting words from Eugene Peterson:

"Most of the individuals in [America and suburbia] suppose that the goals they have for themselves and the goals God has for them are the same. It is the oldest religious mistake: refusing to countenance any real difference between God and us, imagining God to be a vague extrapolation of our own desires, and then hiring a priest to manage the affairs between self and extrapolation."

As I consider some of the issues that God has put on my heart over the past couple years - things like poverty and racial unity in the Church, I know that my concern for those issues is not from me, but I also have to confess that my desire for safety, comfort, and stability have perhaps gotten in the way of at least being open to how God might want to continue to change my heart and my desires to be more like His and to act on some of those passions.

Allowing God that kind of access to my life and my heart is uncomfortable and dangerous because I might just find that instead of a few tweaks and small fixes, major open-heart surgery is necessary to align my desires with His.

I pray today that we might have the courage to surrender control of lives that are not our own into the capable, loving hands of the Lord of the universe. There's a much greater Story in progress than what our measly goals and ambitions can even attempt to imitate, and the question remains - will we allow God free reign to place us in that Story in whatever way He sees fit?

-CK