I am in an experiment to show myself a person can put God first, seek first his kingdom, and spend time with God daily. The experiment seeks to show if a person does put God first then not only will a crazy job and life not fall apart- it will thrive.
So tired this morning. Its been a very busy week and a half in my job and family life. When I pray in the morning I usually walk around the house. I have this perfect circle I can walk. It helps to pray-walk because it gets the blood moving and its impossible to actually fall asleep this way. I could fall asleep anywhere so walking is a good idea.
This whole concept of getting up early(ish) to spend time with God has been a life-long dream of mine but I am such an anti-morning person I never thought it would be possible. I have a funny story to tell you how I first started being able to get up in the morning to pray. It was about 14-15 months ago when, at 3:30 in the morning, we heard banging on our front door and our doorbell was going off. Naturally, I slept through it but my wife woke me up and said, "Brian someone is banging on our front door- and I think its the police!" I walked out of our room and sure enough through the front window I saw a police car shining his headlights into our living room and his red flashing police lights were filling the neighborhood.
With my heart pounding like crazy I stepped up to the front door and made myself open it. It turns out we had left our garage door open and a street nearby had some break-ins. The officer was patrolling around, saw our garage door open at 3:30am, and thought the worst... The officer asked me some questions and let me go. After I closed the garage door I was too wired to sleep so I decided to spend time with the Lord and had a long devotion. I was tired early that next evening and went to bed early- and was able to wake up early. And so it went for months.
So, that difficult wake-up in the middle of the night led to my ability to have morning devotions which I had always thought was impossible- God had to do something radical to change my paradigm. The Lord answered a lifelong prayer of helping the worst morning person in the world have morning devotions- but he had to shake me up to do it. It did NOT look like anything GOOD was going to happen when I was woken up at 3:30 by a banging front door and police lights- it was frankly terrifying- but you can see God's purposes were higher than mine. He did something good through this but I had to go through the tough time to get something good out of it...
God did it again yesterday- he turned my negative situation from the day before into something good. Remember my blog from yesterday morning before work titled, "Well, I failed"- I was so frustrated about things at work the day prior, that I had not been a good example. I had been negative, hopeless, despairing, and sarcastic about job circumstances. But yesterday, the things I learned from the negative/despairing day actually turned into an idea to fix something. BECAUSE OF the pain of the "bad day" I went through I thought of an incredible idea that is going to help every sales rep in the company get detailed information about their accounts- in an easy way. I already have someone implementing this- should be done by Friday. I have been at this company 2.5 years and I have never thought about this idea.
I had no idea when I wrote the blog "Well, I failed" that God took me through that in order to do a lot of good for a lot of people. I'm always looking for ways to empower and equip our sales people and due to God putting me through the hard time- our sales people will have better information on their accounts.
I think you can see a pattern here that God has taken me through some tough times - that ultimately He turns to my good. I think what you and I really have to do when police lights are going off in the middle of the night or jobs are going badly is trust God. I've noticed in walking with the Lord that you can't see where you are headed- you only get to see today. However God sees tomorrow and not only that- he has a plan. Romans 8 says God turns everything to the good of those that follow Christ. I can really see that.
Last thing- I spoke with a friend yesterday afternoon when I implemented the new idea (he had seen the bad attitude the day before that and then also the result of the tough day so he got to see the before/after). I said to him, "sometimes we don't realize we're being blessed even right in the middle of a really bad or dark time". So true.
Lets GO God!
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