Oh man.  Another entry from the town of Wilmington, NC.  I read entries from less than a year ago when I was planning on closing the Wilmington chapter of my life and I laugh out loud.  I’m still here, very much here.  I am starting to cherish it, though.  I have moments of “What’s the next thing, Lord?”  But then I have a good beach day and I don’t ask again for another week or two.

I never explained why/how the Nashville move lapsed.  No blown up engine this time.  Just a strong check in my heart that it was not what I should have done at the time.  I was in the parking lot at my church and broke down in tears, the heaving kind of tears that give you a headache and make your face look swollen.  I called my mom and told her I couldn’t do it, that I just didn’t feel like it was right, that God was brewing things right here so why on earth would I just leave with no solid reason or rhyme?  The hardest phone call was the next one, to my best friend RL who was to be my roommate in Nashville.  I expected a tongue lashing.  I could tell she was disappointed a bit but she could hear my heart and hear that I really didn’t feel like it was right, so she gave her support.  And with a sigh of relief, after telling everyone in my world here that I was planning on leaving in a matter of a month or so, I settled once again back into Wilmington, this town that has been The Wait of my recent life.

I feel like Wilmington has been and continues to be (at least for the immediate future) necessary preparation for something.  And that’s what has finally given me peace about being here.  Even though I feel like I’m in a holding pattern, I just feel like when the holding pattern’s over, I’ll be a heck of a lot farther along than if I would have went against the Lord’s leading.  It’s a backward way of thinking rather than a forward way of thinking.  The world says X event + X event = a certain success.  Our future really is just the product of “good life decisions” in our past.  But as my dad’s friend Doug told me once, God calls to us out of our destiny, not our past.  In other words, we are being drawn to something and are not merely the product of where we’ve come from.  But in order to make it where God wants to draw us, we have to wait on His voice.  I’ve finally come to realize that it truly is a very small voice.  You have to zero in on it if you want to follow it, because there’s a crap ton of other distractions and opinions out there.

God has shown me A LOT about timing lately.  The timing of events in our lives are as important as the events themselves.  I just read in Acts when God gave Peter a vision of animals and told him to eat.  Peter protested because the animals were unclean and the Lord said “What I have made clean, do not call common.”  And that was it.  That’s all God gave him.  And then the Bible says that Peter was perplexed.  God had offered no explanation, simply leaving Peter with a confusing vision about animals.  Afterward, some Gentiles who had been sent by God came to Peter asked him to go back to their town with him, so Peter went and the Gentiles received the Holy Spirit.  It was then that Peter realized that these Gentiles were who God was referring to when he spoke of the common being made clean.  Social prejudice could have kept many people from having the opportunity to believe, but God had prepared Peter’s heart through a vision that made little sense at the moment.  I can see how God has done the same thing in my life.  He has spoken truths and dreams into my heart that haven taken YEARS to develop into fruition.  Some of them haven’t bloomed yet, but I’ve seen enough to rest in His timing.

It’s crazy how identical circumstances can feel so right or so wrong depending on the timing.  How well you feel settled or not settled in a town (i.e., my life story), or the timing of a relationship forming or growing, or pursuing a certain job.

That’s why success can’t simply be measured by circumstance.  Timing and will, the Lord’s will, has to be taken into account.  He might have you preparing for years and years and years in seemingly low circumstances so he can launch you at the right moment.  But the world’s time table is different.  We want a ladder and we want to climb it at our own rate according to our own understanding.  So we gain success, but we give up our dreams.  The success is limited and shallow.  We miss out on being fully who God intended for us to be simply because we would not wait on Him and His timing.

I think about Joseph, being sold into slavery and being imprisoned after being falsely accused of trying to rape Potiphar’s wife.  All after God spoke to him and told him he would rule over his brothers.  What the hayill.  I see this over and over again in scripture, God speaking an explicit dream or vision to someone but not bringing it to fulfillment until years later.  This fact is at first annoying, but at a closer look it’s reassuring.  If God has spoken a dream to you and if you are willing to wait on Him to prepare you for its fruition, big things WILL happen.  If you insist on success as defined by the world and the world’s timing, well then THAT will happen.  And it will be small.  Tragically small in the realm of possibility and the bigness of what the Lord has destined for you.

I was talking to my brother Stephen about this recently– God already has the conclusion and He exists outside of time, but inevitably we have to live in the unfolding of that conclusion because we are subject to time (or at least the illusion of time…I’m not sure time even exists, but that’s another entry entirely…I love a good metaphysical controversy.)  It’s a relief, to know that we really only have to rest and still ourselves to hear his voice and He’ll bring our dreams to us in His way.  It isn’t logical.  Logic has a formula for success.  But God makes kings out of shepherds, and heals people with mud made out of spit and dirt, and makes a carpenter the savior of mankind.  It’s not logical.  It doesn’t fit into our normal way of thinking.  The fruition of our dreams will only be as radical and big as our willingness to wait on them.  Timing is key.  Timing is bigger than circumstance alone.  We don’t move farther along by following a checklist for successful living– we get there by resting in the risk of waiting.  And the Lord will bring our dreams to us if we wait.

If we believe we are renewed in Christ, that we are ever regenerating once we begin to walk with Him, then that means our life is a constant revelation of the fuller, wholer US.  Though our body is growing older, our spirits are becoming more fully awake.  We walk in the hope and promise of newness.  The world is trying to beat the inevitable decay of this life, which is what drives their career/retirement decisions.  We are being made new though, so we don’t have to be driven by a sense of fear or beating the clock.  Once again, we are being called TO something, not just trying to run FROM inevitable, encroaching death.  No, we run towards newer life, the unfolding of our dreams.

We are becoming more fully alive!

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