Me Almighty?

I am afraid I have no answers for you today.  No words of wisdom; no scientific formulas to make your life better.  I cannot promise you that if you do A, B, and C, then the result will be D.

I wish life were that simple.  I wish there were guarantees that if we just did what was right, followed God's plan and His leading, that everything would always be great.

But that, I have learned over and over again, is not always the case.

We live in a fallen world.  We interact with imperfect people.  And we serve a God who is most definitely NOT a Type A personality.  If I understood completely how God worked, I would be God myself.  And quite frankly, I don't need that kind of pressure.  I would be like Jim Carrey's character in "Bruce Almighty," who, when given the opportunity to be "God," instead of wisely considering the prayer requests and answering each one individually, he clicked the "yes" button and answered all of them at the same time.

Efficient? Yes. But the outcome was not quite what people had in mind.  Everyone won the lottery, resulting in the payout for each person being roughly $2.00.  Another woman joyfully exclaimed, "I lost 50 pounds on the Krispy Kreme diet!"  Although my husband and I, both of us being "less than perfect" Weight Watchers members, love to use this line on each other, I know that truthfully, God is not going to just wave His hand and "POOF!" cause all my excess weight to disappear.  What then?  Do I get to keep eating the Krispy Kremes and let Him bail me out every time I put it back on?  How am I going to learn to fuel my body the way He intended for me to fuel it?

And I know that "Bruce Almighty" is a fictional movie.  A comedy, no less.

But it did make me think about the assumption that a lot of us have that the way to gain God's favor is through "doing the right thing."  That we can manipulate His will by being the perfect model Christian citizen.  This is especially true for those of us living in the fishbowl called ministry.  There is a certain "image" that we feel we must live up to (and I'm not convinced that anyone can truly define what it is, even though we are all trying to live up to it!).

When the word of God tells us that our righteousness is like filthy rags.  That we are saved through grace, and NOT of ourselves.

Please do not misunderstand me - I am not saying that we should not live our lives in a godly manner.  If we are truly followers of Christ, we should be striving to live as He has commanded us to live.

I'm just saying that we are not necessarily going to get Him to do what we want just by living right.  Sometimes He knows best - better than we do.  Sometimes He is trying to teach us something.  Sometimes (and I know we don't like to consider this!), our own foolish choices have natural consequences, and He's not always going to come down and "fix" everything. 

But we can trust that He knows what He is doing - even when we don't have the slightest clue.  And I pray that we can all get to the point where, like the title character in "Bruce Almighty," we can fall to our knees and tell our Creator, "I am TIRED of being God - I surrender my life to your will!"

And really mean it.